That was a bad typo...

It is hard to imagine a worse place to make a typo (typographic error) than on the title page. Copies of the book with the correct title page are fairly abundant--the British Libray has one and there are several in US libraries. One can only speculate how this one came about--possibly the book was a cheap pirate of the original local best seller and the title was shouted across a busy print room with the 'how' pronounced in the Italian style. When the error was pointed out the printers may have just kept printing them as a hilarious curiosity like the riverside sign 'Omlets' in 'The History of Mr Polly". *

I can see the book being touted about 1950s Venice by bent gondoliers and a bunch of shady crooks (as played, say, by Italianate versions of the young George Cole). I only have the title page which someone left folded into a Baedeker 'Italy from the Alps to Naples' and I subsequently stuck it on the wall of my book pricing room along with other mildly amusing bookish tat -like a headline clipped from a 1960s UK tabloid 'The Man with a Mountain of Books'. That's another story...