It was by the sheerest fluke that I discovered that there had been a third printing of my Gödel book. I was in Waterstone’s in Bloomsbury with time to kill, looking through the maths books, and there were a couple of copies of my book. And (as you do!) I was flicking through it, and found that (a) there had been another reprint without checking with me to see if I wanted to correct anything, and (b) in fact the reprint reproduced the original version, not the corrected second printing. On the scale of world disasters, this perhaps doesn’t register (I tell myself). But I was damned cross all the same.
I’m pleased to report, then, that CUP have been more than apologetic. They have hung, drawn and quartered the culprit; are changing procedures so it can’t happen to anyone else’s book; are going to withdraw all the copies and pulp them; and I’m going to get a fourth reprint with whatever further corrections I want to make. Which is, all-in-all, an excellent outcome. Though, as I said, all the result of a fluke discovery.
This is also the case with e.g. Blackburn et al "Modal Logic" (CUP), whose third reprinting reinstated all the errata corrected in the second edition! Why oh why do they do this?