World Notes FRANCE

The venerable publishing house's logo portrays a young woman blowing softly through a dandelion, sowing knowledge. What an upset, then, for Larousse to discover spores of deadly misinformation in the latest edition of its dictionary. A color illustration on page 203 of the 1991 Petit Larousse en Couleurs incorrectly identifies three highly poisonous wild mushrooms as being harmless.

Reacting promptly to correct the mistake, the worst in its history, Larousse suspended all sales of the 1,700-page, $75 dictionary, which sells more than a million copies a year, and recalled the 180,000 volumes already distributed so corrected champignon stickers can be placed over the erroneous captions. Cost: $5.5 million.