[lacker]

Reading the DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, it said that there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way. Especially for a "basic calculus" issue like this, for someone who wrote a whole book on the mathematical history of infinity. (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)

[thaumasiotes]

> there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.

You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.

[gowld]

> (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)

They were more mis-simplifications by the lay writer.

[spondylosaurus]

I've definitely noticed some of those odd one-off typos, like misspelling the NIKKEI stock exchange as NIKEI, but I had always just assumed some of those were bound to slip through in such a long, dense novel, even with an astute editor :P It sounds like that may not be the case after all...