The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [91]
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been around the country, and now I’m going to be back in the town where I grew up,” I shouted above the music. “I shouldn’t have to sneak around—I’m a native son!”
“I don’t know that everyone’s going to see it quite that way,” Benjamin hollered back.
“That’s okay. I … want to try it this way.”
He nodded. “That’s fair.”
The pot I’d stirred in Albany would soon begin to foam over. By dealing directly with the people closest to the typo, I invited the citizens of Manchester to reveal themselves to me. I’d realize eventually that I could have done this with anything—say, carrying around jars of pickles, asking people to taste-test. In calling for a day without stealth, I’d effectively called for interactions of all manner and degree, and Manchester delivered more than I ever could have anticipated.
It all came down to Elm Street, the heart of Manchester’s once-and-future downtown. For the largest city in New Hampshire, with more than a hundred thousand people, old Manch Vegas (as certain wags referred to it) possessed a conspicuous lack of character. Elm was the only place where you could find a few independent businesses huddling together for shelter from the chains. The city had been making more of an effort in recent years to spruce up the downtown area, and Elm Street did boast a few newer restaurants and bars, but nobody shopped there. Why deal with the sparse parking and sparser selection of wares when you could head over to the mall or the Walmart on South Willow? A couple of blocks west, the red behemoths of former industry sulked over the Merrimack River on both banks. Some parts of the old cotton and locomotive mill buildings had found a second life as restaurant or condo space, but nobody had figured out how to use the considerable real estate to its fullest advantage.
We parked on Elm outside a used bookstore, which drew Benjamin in like an iron bee to a neodymium honeypot. I picked up the book Red Mars, deciding not to wait for the copy that Benjamin had offered to lend me. He called me over to the back run, where he’d caught not only a classic apostrophe for a plural (ALL AUDIO’S 25% OFF), but a new category of fiction: COMTEMPORARY. I could tell by the look on his face that he wanted to ask, “Are you sure about this no-stealth-correction thing?” These errors were at the opposite corner of the store from the register, where the only clerk in the store was ringing someone up. We were well concealed by overstuffed bookcases. How easy these could be to right. I shook my head no.
“Hear me out. I know we’re a solid twenty-five corrections over fifty percent, but that”—and here he pointed to COMTEMPORARY, which he must have spotted second—“is just wrong.”
“Then I hope this bookstore cares as much as we do about words.” I considered other bookstores we’d examined across the country, realizing how few of them had yielded typos. I’d made them a stop in nearly every major city. I could remember only Galveston’s bookstore typos now, and that place had been one of our best responses. I approached the counter, and the woman asked if I was ready to check out. I looked at Red Mars in my hand—I was, wasn’t I? After we did that, I asked about the signs.
“Oh, we had a volunteer who made those signs.” Ahh, right. Volunteers are apparently held to a different standard. It was the Cartoon Art Museum all over again. If you’re getting paid, you ought to be professional, but what can they do to you when you’re a volunteer? If they’d written “maid by valunteeerz” on the signs, I could have saved myself the trouble of asking. I don’t know if the employee could read these thoughts from my face, but she must have read something (though clearly not the signs in her store). She added another reason not to bother: “They’ve been up for a long time and nobody seems