Oh, GROAN.

So, I did this thing for myself, where I promised I would NOT go all the way through the book looking for errors until it had been here for a few weeks, because I wanted to allow myself some bliss before I inevitably found something to have a meltdown about.

Pity, the folks at the Minnesota Star-Tribune didn’t wait like me.

Oops. What we meant to write was…
By Gail Rosenblum, Star Tribune

“Oh, my. An otherwise terrific new book on sexuality for young adults is being distributed nationwide with a wee typo. “S.E.X.: The all-you-need-to-know progressive sexuality guide to get you through high school and college,” by Heather Corinna, is chock full of clear, current and inclusive information and advice for young people wherever they are in their philosophical and physical development.

But, unless the human body has done some pretty significant evolving of late, the clinically drawn reproductive organs labeled “female” in the chapter titled, “Your Body: An Owner’s Manual,” actually belong to males. A good-natured spokeswoman for the book’s publisher, Marlowe & Co., who hadn’t been alerted to the error until a reporter called, said she’d talk with her editor right away. Like, as soon as she hung up the phone. The label will be changed for the second printing. Until then, we couldn’t resist writing our own correction on their behalf: “While we support progressive sexuality, we unfortunately went a bit too far.”

Alas, they are not incorrect (however irritating it is that those nice Minnesotans would make more than half the review about this: yes, that quoted text IS the whole review).

Now, I’d already found — ha, you didn’t find THAT, Star-Tribune, did you! — the internal clitoris illustration in which the design team misspelled urethra as “urethea.” (And, as a result, had this notion we’d someday see a kid or two named Urethea, just because it sounded so purty.) But what I hadn’t noticed yet, that they did, is that the illustration at the start of the chapter on male sexual anatomy is, in fact, labeled beneath as female sexual anatomy.

Mind, given where it’s placed (in the male anatomy section, after two pages of penis illustrations), and the fact that it clearly is male anatomy, paired with text to explain male anatomy, it’s obviously a misprint — and one, likely because of its obvious context, that it seems we ALL missed: my editor, myself, several proofreaders at the publishers, as well as friends here proofing the pass pages — and it’s not a picture book, for crying out loud — there are almost 350 wide pages of TEXT to focus on and actually review. But still, to this I say a resounding UGH at myself.

And people wonder why I prefer publishing online. I tell ya.

filed under Heather Corinna | bookish bits | s.e.x.
posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 3:47 pm

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