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I recently met the memory of Emilie Rothschild, the librarian in Port Thompson, Wash., in the early 1900s. Her family home is a well-run museum where I learned of her past librarying at the local library.

Besides the library, she took care of her elderly mother, never married and had many friends and activities, but today she’s mainly remembered for her napkin ring collection.

Perhaps it’s a professional affliction, and this kettle’s accusing no pots of blackness. After all, there’s an International Society of Bible Collectors. I may own six different Bibles, but I’m not a true collector. The society’s Web site, www.biblecollectors.org, mentioned one: a St. Olaf College librarian happily named Olaf Norlie.

A leading Bible translator, Greek scholar, Lutheran minister and all-round academician who authored numerous Bible-related books, Olaf ran into controversy in 1961 when his “Norlie’s Simplified New Testament in Plain English” was published.

Many Christian fundamentalists believe any altering of the King James version is blasphemy, but the Bible has been published in many versions, including John Wycliff’s first English translation of the New Testament in 1382. Wycliff argued for biblical lessons composed in the English vernacular, saying “it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”

Those were fighting words at the Vatican, and Wycliff was denounced. Despite the best papal efforts to destroy Wycliff’s New Testament, some 150 copies still exist, and it profoundly influenced the subsequent King James version. The Vatican complained of errors in Wycliff’s translation from the Latin Vulgate Bible, but nearly every book written contains mistakes.

Wycliff was a contemporary of Chaucer, who wrote in Middle English when our language was especially plastic and changing, and lexicographical experimentation abounded. So it wasn’t surprising to read at Biblecollectors.org that Wycliff’s work is known as the “Breeches Bible,” since it describes Adam and Eve making breeches after leaving Eden, instead of the usual “aprons.”

Many Bible editions have error-based nicknames, mostly caused by printing errors. A passage in a 1631 edition of the KJV known as the “Wicked Bible” left “not” out of the seventh commandment, so it reads “thou shalt commit adultery,” and the 1801 Murderer’s Bible reads “these are murderers” instead of “mumurmers.”

Collectors hunt for Unrighteous, Denial, Fool’s, Camels and Ears to Ears Bibles, all named for printers’ goofs. The most sought-after of all, the 1454 Gutenberg Bible, however, is error-free.

As owner of a printing press, my respect for handprinters is boundless, particularly keeping the tiny pieces of type sorted. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word “pied” means “to jumble of mix up type.” It’s origin is uncertain, but the word “pie” once meant “magpies,” entering English from the Old French “pie” which came from the Latin for magpie, “pica.”

The bird’s black and white plumage inspired comparison to a religious order known as the “pyed frères,” or “pied friars,” which was applied to anyone with varied clothing, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Pied Piper was a historical figure who did something awful with a bunch of children on June 26, 1284, but no one knows what; murder, pederasty or simply relocating them.

Similar medieval rat-and-children-luring stories abound across Europe, but pipe playing never entered into it until 1556 in Duke Froben von Zimmern’s version of the Hamelin story. The tale was written in English in 1605 by Richard Verstegan, who introduced the name “Pied Piper.”

Computers can compound printing errors. Optical character recognition programs scan text and save it digitally, but the average OCR accuracy rate is 98 percent, so of the typical 2,000 letters on a typical page, 40 will be wrong. Even a handful’s a problem, but that’s job security for proofreaders.

Even Mark Twain, who once wrote “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers,” admitted the need for proofing.

When an author looks for errors “you are merely reading your own mind … your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don’t know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along … the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn’t light the jets.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.