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Whoops -- a small error in print

Carried over for over 100 years. From The Atlantic:

The New York Times Had a Mistake on Its Front Page Every Day for More Than a Century
Nobody knows exactly how it happened, but somehow, between February 6, 1898, and February 7, 1898, the issue numbering for The New York Times got a little ... off.

It's easy enough to imagine the scene: A worker, late at night, setting the paper's front-page type. He takes out the type from the preceding day's paper. He looks at the issue number�14,499�and adds one. He gets 15,000.

Perhaps he misread the number, and thought he saw 14,999 in its place. Or perhaps he'd had a long night, and just wasn't thinking straight. Who knows? What we know is that he put 15,000 as the issue number for the next day, and nobody noticed.

And nobody noticed the next day, nor the next day, nor the next.

In fact, nobody noticed until 1999, when a news assistant at the Times, Aaron Donovan got suspicious. On the first day of 2000, the Times issued a correction with an explanatory note.

Oopsie... Posted by DaveH at January 17, 2014 5:22 PM