Is "not" a printing mistake?

Hello
I was reading the following paragraph and when I reached the bold part it seemed to me that the “not” is a printing mistake. It doesn’t seem logical when you read the whole paragraph. It seems that “and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires’ story had begun” is the correct one.
Is there anyone who can help me?

But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires’ story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children’s story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires’ story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker’s assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that left the Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart.

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It takes a while to wade through all that, but it’s correct.

The original version
““it could not be said that the Baudelaires’ story had not begun””

Your version:
“it could not be said that the Baudelaires’ story had begun”

Your version is saying it had not begun. That is not true because it had already begun. It then gives examples of things that happened prior to that to show that it HAD begun already.

You can not say it had not begun because it HAD begun.

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Thank you very much for taking the time to answer this question on a Sunday morning. I’ve been busy working on an article about speech training and voice coaching after perusing some of the materials created by @JadeJoddle I must say I’m very impressed by her approach and the way she captivates her audience…

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Your article idea sounds interesting. Looking forward to reading it. :+1:

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