When Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett sent a copy of his "Poems in English" to friend and American novelist and short-story writer Kay Boyle in April 1963, she sent it back. It wasn't that she didn't like the book or appreciate the gesture. It was just that Beckett had made a glaring error in the last poem, one of four that had English and French translations on facing pages.

So, Boyle wrote to Beckett, asking him "to be more accurate in his translating of his work from English into French." Beckett obliged, crossing off the mistake and writing the correct translation in ink. He initialed the change and sent it back to Boyle.

The original line read: "Mourning the first and last to love me."

The corrected line reads: "Mourning her who thought she loved me."

The corrected Beckett book, along with an inserted note of explanation from Boyle, eventually found its way to the Special Collections Department at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, where it can be accessed by students in the new Rare Books & Special Collections concentration being offered this fall in C.W. Post’s Palmer School of Library and Information Science.

For more information call the C.W. Post Office of Public Relations at 516-299-2334.