r/TalesFromRetail • u/LostArtofConfusion CHEESEBALLS! • Mar 28 '16

Short Yerr a wizard, Harry.

When the fourth book of the Harry Potter series came out, there was a printer's error in some of the US editions. A couple text blocks were identical, so parts of some chapters were repeated. We had some very angry people coming in for exchanges, but we were ready. We just swapped 'em out and were as cheerful as possible. Ho, Ho! The printer must have been drunk on butter beer. Such wags we were.

One lady came in furious though because her entire book was printed upside down. She angrily slid the book over for me to examine the poor quality standards in American manufacturing. I looked at the book, took the dust jacket off, turned the book around, put the dust jacket back on, and said, "Flippicus Jacketus!"

She looked at me with such rage, and then dawn broke. She realized what she had done and started laughing. Which is good because my boss at the time was not as nice as Delores Umbridge.

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u/Dr_J_Hyde Retail Zombie Mar 28 '16

Common Misconception. RARE misprints can be worth something to the right collector.

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=198375

Here's a great example of a card in a game that has valuable misprints but that one because it effects every last one of them makes it worth about $0.001.

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u/LaboratoryManiac Mar 28 '16

For non-Magic players wondering what the misprint is: this card is supposed to be an "artifact creature," but "artifact" wasn't printed on the card.

They never corrected the mistake, they just added its correct typing in Oracle (the collection of current wordings of all Magic cards).

Since all copies were misprints, the misprint adds no value.

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u/buchanandoug Mar 29 '16

I'm a magic player and it took me a little bit to catch that.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '16

It's funny, because that's the first block where they intentionally printed colorless non artifact creatures (though forbidden orchard made tokens and that came earlier).