Curiosa: Disclaimer ...

Anyone who's read my fanfiction knows that I'm inclined to lard it with foreign languages (usually German or Latin, branching out occasionally into French or even Mandarin Chinese). Errors in spelling, grammar and syntax are inevitable and proofreading a necessity which does not always achieve its object. So I was much amused by the chutzpah demonstrated by either printer Henry Hills or author Samuel Morland in prefixing the latter's History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piemont (1658) with the following notice:

An Advertisement to the READER.
Though it be the custome of Printers to prefix their Errata to the Books they publish, I hope the want thereof here, will not make this be thought the more imperfect. Where the Reader finds a different Orthography in some of the French and Italian manuscripts, from that of later times, his judgement will tell him that its an Argument of their Antiquity; where he meets with any real mistake, (which will be no wonder in such variety of matter, and Languages) his ingenuity will easily prompt him to correct them.

A more perfect combination of excuse and flattery is hardly to be imagined. I wonder if subsequent editions retained this note ... or if the printer's apprentice finally coughed up a list of errata ...