Beatles Book Reviews on my Blog | Fab Forum

Nice reviews there, DrBeatle. Will have to check out the Harrison bio. The Day By Day book seems to have some similarities with Into the Sky with Diamonds.

I had to chuckle at your comments on typos in the Beatles Day By Day book. Speaking from experience, typos are equally excruciating to the author.

Analyzing the source of typos is a revealing experience:

Some are truly typos and are purely the result of suboptimal proofreading, as in writing Dob Dylan instead of Bob Dylan. 

Many typos though are flat out mistakes.

So why are there mistakes?

- An editor may not be a super expert in the subject. He or she may pick up spelling and grammar mistakes, but not factual errors. (Not every Beatle author has the luxury of having mja6758 give the book a once-over.)

- An author writing  about 1000 facts will double check the 950 facts he's not 100% sure about, but will rely on his/her memory for the 50 others. Could be an error in there...

- Inadequate research. It may be hard to apply the word 'inadequate' to someone who's spent 5000 hours researching a book - but perhaps the subject matter required 5100 hours.

- It's become so easy to move text around that an author can easily cut and paste himself into an anachronism.

- Conflicting sources. Whom do you believe? Does majority rule? I initially had the Beatles arriving in Hamburg the day JFK was killed. I didn't dream that up; I got that from a source - but the source was wrong. 

- "Reliable" sources aren't always 100% reliable. In his Howard Stern interview a few weeks ago, McCartney placed Revolver before Rubber Soul. Don't you think he'd know??? Of course. It was a slip of the tongue, a senior moment. The point is that people who 'were there' don't necessarily remember accurately.

P.S. this post has not been reviewed by an independent proofreader.