Road trip

The three-month odyssey ended with a whimper, though, when the guys returned to Deck’s Somerville home to face a summons from the National Park Service: A sign they had corrected at the Grand Canyon was, it seemed, a 1932 hand-painted artifact, its mispunctuation protected by federal law. Deck and Herson could have gotten away with it — but they had posted the damning evidence on their own blog. Fined, muzzled, mocked in the media, and given a year’s probation, they closed the incriminating website and hunkered down.

But in the same spirit of enterprise that launched the trip, Deck and Herson have now made lemonade from that sour experience. In their new book, “The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time” (Crown, $23.99), they tell their side of the story: The arduous weeks on the road, the 437 typos spotted, the 236 corrected.

Yes, you could find 437 typos closer to home in a lot less time, just by reading newspapers and restaurant menus, without putting an ounce of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where’s the adventure in that? Deck, the instigator and narrator, understands that the idea of two Dartmouth grads setting forth to rid the world of “hooded sweatts” and “braclets” is comic at its core, and he wisely takes a mock-heroic tone: “Your/you’re confusion, comma and apostrophe abuse, transpositions and omissions....Each one on its own amounted to naught but a needle of irritation thrusting into my tender hide. But together they constituted a larger problem, a social ill that cried out for justice.”