Am I alone in finding this picture heart warming?

I thought not.

Meet Benjamin Herson who, with pal Jeff Deck, spent much of 2008 correcting errors on signs and billboards across the USA – and then blogged about it. During their Reign of Error, no grocer’s apostrophe was safe.

Good news you might think. Nice to see a pair of public spirited gents raising standards of grammar and spelling.

Not so, thought the authorities – which slapped them with a $3,035 fine for conspiring to destroy Government property. They might have got away with it, but their corrections to a 70-year-old sign on a Grand Canyon watchman’s tower was thought to be an amendment too far. They were undone by adding a comma in the first paragraph and an apostrophe to ‘womens’.

The last laugh is with Herson and Deck, though. They’ve just been given a $150,000 advance to write about their experiences. The Great Typo Hunt is due for release this August. I’m going to reserve my copy now.