New number one in my list of worst copyediting mistakes of all time: the consistent misspelling of ‘Ouspensky‘ as ‘Onpensky’ in the text of Aldo Leopold’s ‘The Land Ethic’, in Hugh LaFollette‘s first year ethics collection ‘Ethics in Practice’. See here.

I’ve taught a course based on this book: Leopold is the highlight of the course, since here we finally get an attempt to engage more than the intellectual faculties in thinking about issues which are clearly intractable while they are approached purely intellectually. The students get interested; they are engaged. And then we get Leopold’s extended discussion of the striking analogy between the Earth and a cubic centimetre of living flesh. We might well want to know more — we might want to look up this mysterious Russian ‘Onpensky’ who dares to make such a far-reaching claim.

All in vain. The Blackwell copyeditor has foreclosed on this exploration. The typo obliterates a very worthy practical metaphysician who is entirely ignored in academia; but this does not warrant a conspiracy theory, however, since the whole reader is so consumed by typos that we have to proceed by guessing at the general gist in many places.