Corrections

The correction log for all three volumes · last reviewed July 2026.

Every figure in these books is supposed to trace to a named source. This is the page where we write down the times it did not. It is the other half of the Cited-Source Guarantee: a promise to correct the record is worth nothing without a public place where the correction actually appears.

Every entry below was caught by an internal audit before a single copy went out, so nobody read a wrong number in a book they paid for. We are logging them anyway. A correction log that only starts once a customer catches us is not a log, it is a complaint form — and the point of this page is to show that the checking happens whether or not anyone is watching. What follows is what the audit found, what the record actually says, and the source that settled it.

1. 30 July 2026 · Volume I and the free booklet What was written: a family of four’s red-point budget worked out to roughly 88.8 points a week, derived by taking 64 points per person per month and dividing by 4.33 weeks. What the record shows: 16 red points per person per week — 64 for a household of four, and 64 per person across the four weeks of one ration book. The printed figure was twice the true one, and the division that produced it should never have been performed: the O.P.A. published the weekly number directly. Source that settled it: Official Table of Consumer Point Values for Meat, Fats, Fish, and Cheese — No. 1, Effective March 29, 1943. O.P.A., printed in full in The Centre Democrat (Bellefonte, PA), March 25, 1943, p. 2. The earlier figure had come from a later summary rather than from the table itself. Fixed in: Edition 1, before first publication.
2. 30 July 2026 · Volume I and the free booklet What was written: that children under six drew roughly half an adult’s point allotment. What the record shows: we cannot support it. No O.P.A. order we hold states a reduced children’s point quota, and the statement has been removed rather than replaced with a different guess. Source that settled it: none — and that is the finding. The claim had no order behind it, and it was the arithmetic root of the error above. Fixed in: Edition 1, before first publication.
3. 30 July 2026 · Volume I, the free booklet and the sales pages What was written: the 1943 grocery week of $8.83 converted to $171.06 today, and the milk line converted to $42.06. What the record shows: $171.04 and $42.03. At the 1943 multiplier of ×19.37, $8.83 × 19.37 = $171.037 and $2.17 × 19.37 = $42.033. Two cents and three cents — small enough that nobody would have caught them, which is exactly why they are logged. Source that settled it: B.L.S. CPI-U, series CUUR0000SA0, 1943 annual average against May 2026 (335.123), recomputed line by line. Fixed in: Edition 1, before first publication.
4. 30 July 2026 · the sales pages What was written: two sentences set in quotation marks and signed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin Nº 799 — one about the cost of a market basket in March 1943, one about point values being changed to encourage or discourage purchases. What the record shows: the bulletin contains neither sentence. Bulletin 799 is a retail price bulletin: it publishes unit prices by commodity, does not total a basket, and does not discuss ration points at all. The month was ours to get wrong rather than the bulletin’s: Table 4 does print monthly columns, but our $8.83 was summed from its 1943 annual-average column, so calling that total a March figure dated our own arithmetic to a month it was not built from. It is now described as what it is — our addition on their prices, with all eighteen lines printed so the sum can be checked. Source that settled it: the bulletin itself — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Retail Prices of Food, 1942 and 1943, Bulletin No. 799 (GPO, 1945), read in full. Neither phrase occurs in its fifty-two pages. Fixed in: replaced before the pages went live. The quotation now carries the O.P.A. table’s own dated heading, which can be read in the newspaper page we cite.
5. 30 July 2026 · Volume II and Volume III What was written: internal working-file names and workflow markers — research file identifiers, and bracketed confidence codes — printed as if they were sources. What the record shows: those are our notes, not the record. A reader cannot open them, so they fail the only test that matters here. Each has been replaced with the external source the note was standing in for, or the claim has been lowered to what the source actually carries. Source that settled it: the research files themselves, read against the external documents they cite. Fixed in: Edition 1, before first publication.
6. 30 July 2026 · the printable point card What was written: red and blue quotas side by side, both labelled “per person, per month.” What the record shows: the two colours ran on different clocks. Red stamps were spent against the ration book’s four-week period; blue points against the calendar month. Giving them one unit asserts a shared divisor that never existed, and it was that false equivalence which produced the first error on this page. Source that settled it: the O.P.A. tables cited above, each carrying its own effective date and period. Fixed in: Edition 1, before first publication.

Nothing on this list was reported by a reader, because there were no readers yet. Once there are, the entries will look the same and be logged the same way — dated, with the source that settled it — and they will stay here.

What a logged correction contains

• The volume and page, and which figure or statement was wrong.
• What the book printed, quoted exactly, not paraphrased into something softer.
• What the record actually shows, and the named source — order, bulletin, table, page — that settles it.
• The date the correction was logged, and the edition the fix went into.

Our rules for this page

• Nothing here is ever deleted. If a correction turns out to be wrong itself, we log a further correction under a new date and leave the first one standing.
• Corrections are logged whenever they are found — there is no window on being wrong. What the refund terms are, and how long they run, is set out on the Terms of Sale page.
• Everyone who bought the book gets the corrected file, at no charge, sent to the address the purchase was made with.
• A correction of substance is a correction, not a typo. Spelling and punctuation are fixed quietly in the next edition; a wrong number, a wrong date, a wrong attribution or a statement the source does not support is logged on this page.

Found something?

Write to [email protected] with the volume, the page, and what you think the figure should be. A person reads every letter. If you are right, this page changes and you will see your correction on it. The full bibliography behind every figure — every order, bulletin and archive record the books rest on — is on the sources page, free to read.