Helen Fielding's final edition to her Bridget Jones trilogy 'Mad About The Boy' has caused quite a stir this week by the addition of an unexpected new character: David Jason.

In what is probably one of the biggest printing blunders of recent years, the long-awaited arrival of the final novel documenting the life of ungainly and exceptionally ordinary serial singleton Bridget Jones has been met with utter shock as the earliest copies are revealed to contain a portion of 'Only Fools and Horses' star David Jason's autobiography 'My Life' within its pages.

Helen Fielding 'Mad About The Boy' book launchDavid Jason 'My Life' book launch
Helen Fielding and David Jason at their not entirely successful respective book launches

The error was discovered on Thursday (October 10th 2013) during the release of both publications and now online and high street stores are working to pull the botched copies from the shelves as 'Mad About The Boy' is re-called to print. The funny thing is is that it's exactly the sort of thing we'd imagine Bridget doing when she worked at a publishing house in the first volume, 'Bridget Jones's Diary', released in 1996. Indeed, Vintage publishers have admitted that 'the printers have had a Bridget moment'.

'A printing error has been detected in some of the very early copies of 'Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy', they explained. 'Copies printed on one day have given readers an accidental preview of David Jason's autobiography. We are taking steps to remove these copies from sale and will be replacing misprinted stock as soon as possible.'

It's not the first major publication to have been released to the public with huge mistakes. Early editions of 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban' had the author's full name "Joanne Rowling" on the inside rather than nom de plume JK Rowling, and the Oprah-endorsed 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen was first printed with page 431 coming before 430. Going back a few centuries, 1,000 editions of the King James Bible printed one of the commandments as, 'Thou shalt commit adultery' - we all know what that was meant to say and, needless to say, most of those edition were subsequently burned. Many books have simply been released containing typos (something not uncommonly found by your average eagle-eyed bookworm), but if you are lucky enough to own a 1885 copy of Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' which has the word 'saw' confused with 'was', you could sell it for a small fortune!

Though the publishers were reluctant to reveal just how many copies of the novel were misprinted in 'Mad About The Boy', author Helen Fielding has seen the funny side of things, proclaiming, 'Nothing turns out quite perfectly.'