The first lesson I learned about writing was to check for errors and then check again. And I keep learning the same lesson over and over. I'm not the first or the worst mistake-maker. Writers have been making errors forever. Google the topic "mistakes in books" or "authors' mistakes" and prepare to be overwhelmed. These mistakes take many forms, and some have become famous. In the "Wicked Bible" of 1631, the 7th Commandment reads, "Thou shalt commit adultery." In Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the shipwreck survivor Crusoe is on the island watching his ship sink. He takes off his clothes and swims back out to the ship to salvage supplies, which he brings back to shore in the pockets he no longer has.
Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy has two lovers "like two small chips being tossed on a rough but friendly sea." Did he intend them to be ships? Nobody knows, but we suspect. Simple typos can easily survive a writer's scrutiny, especially if the letters still form actual words. In The Good Earth Pearl Buck describes a group of huts clinging to a wall "like flees to a dog's back." A contemporary error that I just learned about is a thought by Cersei in the fifth book of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire: "‘I am beautiful,' she reminded himself."
