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The proofreading of Gutenberg texts is atrocious if not nonexistent.
There are books with typos in the title (The Case of General Opel). There are books where the first letter of the first word of Chapter 1 is a typo (Fraternity). Classics of literature have been turned into fart jokes ("In my extreme distress of wind, I have a morbid
fear..." -- Dr Jekyll). Books that seem to be sneering parodies of their authors work ("North we raced from the Bonin Islands to pick up the seal-herd, and north we hunted it for a hundred days into frosty, mitten weather" - John Barleycorn). There are books with over one thousand typos, exclusive of punctuation (Mr Scarborough's Family). Works with fewer errors, but more spoiled by them; for instance, to take the same author, Framley Parsonage; because of the typist's inattention, it's narrated not by a worldly, detached observer, but by something of a doofus. Typos have redrawn the map of the world (there is a border, in The Mad King, between Austria and Siberia, not Serbia). There are many books with a page or two missing (eg. Barry Lyndon) and some with every fifth chapter missing (Dolly Dialogues).
Execrable as this system is, it's preferable to any plan to "simply" recut literature to our modern tastes, as of the current o'clock. One wonders what The Merry Wives of Windsor, or The English Rogue by Richard Head, would look like after such emendations.
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