The Southern Necessity.

Adrian Tahourdin’s TLS review of Rebecca Lee’s Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and misadventures in the world of books just keeps getting better: The title Rogues, Widows and Orphans is slightly misleading. Although rogues abound here, a book that was largely about typographical misfortunes would test the patience of most readers. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a widow as a “short (esp. single-word) last line of a paragraph left at the top of a page or column and considered undesirable” and an orphan as “a word or line undesirably separated by a page break from the paragraph to which it belongs”. Rebecca Lee ranges far more widely, however, taking in “Ick Lit”, censorship, plagiarism, hoaxes, rejection, writer’s block, literary rivalry, hatchet jobs and the “existential challenge posed by AI”. The typo has a long and venerable role in the history of publishing, dating back, Lee reminds us, to Shakespeare and earlier. In recent years the Guardian (or Grauniad, as it is…