Today was a very long day. The post I planned will have to wait. But do check in tomorrow–it’s going to be a veritable comment-fest with responses for everyone.
In the meantime let’s talk typos. I’ve been witness to, if not a participant in, discussions of various typos throughout the Little House series. Even for a copy editor like myself, I admit I haven’t noticed many. The fan in me tells me I simply must be too close to the work to be critical. 🙂
But one typo has always rankled me, and I wonder if anyone else has noticed it. It’s in “Mary Goes to College” in Little Town on the Prairie. Mary has gone to, uh, college, escorted by Ma and Pa, who have left the three remaining girls to mind the house in their absence. Laura decides to do the spring cleaning, and at one point, Grace is not-so-helpfully blacking the stove, and she spills the box of blacking. The one-sentence paragraph that follows reads thusly:
“Her blues eyes were filled with tears.”
Kills me every time.
Only Laura 
Oh, so that wasn’t just an allusion to Grace’s favorite musical style? 😉
Actually, I’d never noticed that at all and I recently reread LTotP. Usually typos are a particular pet peeve of mine and I’ve noticed a couple in the LH books but they must not have bothered me too much since I can’t remember them right now.
I don’t see that typo in any of my copies of LTP; which editon/cover are you reading?
My favorite was the line in TLW that Pa would have to bring in the hay in his teeth, one BALE at a time!!
Gee, I’m a copy editor, too, and I had to read it several times before I noticed the error! It could have been worse: “Her blue eyes killed with tears.” or “Her blue eyes filled with pears.” As typos go, it’s pretty harmless. : )
My favorite errors are in Plum Creek–the use of the english spelling of “plow” vs. “plough” and the reaction of RWL when the book was published .
I don’t see the blues eye in my Sewell edition.