If not hurried by a press of work, as may sometimes be the case, the reader will first glance at the proof as a whole. A variation in the thickness of the leads, or a wrong indention, will, in this tout-ensemble survey, very quickly catch his eye. Then, still supposing he has time, he will read the galley through silently, correcting errors in spelling; marking turned or inverted letters; improving the {p41} spacing, the punctuation; noting whether the heads and subheads are in the required type; whether the capitalization is uniform; whether—if the “slip” beneath his eye happen to be near the end of a large volume—the word “ourang-outang” which he now meets with, was not printed somewhere in the earlier part of the work as “orang-outang,” or, in fact, whether, after some questioning, it finally went to press as “orang-utan,”—which word he must now, to preserve uniformity, hunt for and find among his old proofs, if, peradventure, author or publisher, or other person, have not borrowed them “for a few minutes,”—alas! never to be returned.
Having settled this, and all similar cases and other doubtful matters, he hands the copy to an assistant, called a “copy-holder,” whose duty it is to read the copy aloud, while he himself keeps his eye on the print (but in newspaper offices, for the sake of greater celerity, the proof-reader often reads aloud, while the copy-holder follows him silently, intent on the copy: interrupting, however, whenever any discrepancy is observed). If the reader desire the copy-holder to pause while he makes a correction, he repeats the word where he wishes the reading to stop; when ready to proceed he again pronounces the same word, and the copy-holder reads on from that place.
The manner of marking, in the text, all errors noticed, is shown, infra, in the “Specimen of First Proof.” The corrections to be made are indicated, in the margin, by appropriate words or characters from “Marks used in correcting Proofs”—also {p42} inserted below. Writers for the press who themselves examine proof-sheets of their works, should familiarize themselves with proof-reading technics. An author who received for the first time some proof-sheets returned them “clean”—apparently having detected no errors. He was afterward disgusted on finding it necessary to print a leaf of “errata,” and complained that his corrections had been entirely disregarded. On re-examining the proofs he had returned, it was found that he had corrected—with knife as well as pen. Where a comma was wanting, he had used the pen, carefully and skillfully imitating the printed character; and to convert semicolons into commas he had brought the knife into play,—nicely scratching out the superfluous part of the point.
Sometimes a line, or it may be several lines, of type are by some mishap out of perpendicular—slanting; so that only one side of each letter-face shows a full impression on the proof. It is usual in such case to draw several slanting marks across the faulty line or lines, and make similar marks in the margin. It is quite common, also, for readers to insert in the margin the words “off its feet,”—that being the printing-office designation for sloping matter. One reader abandoned writing these words, for two reasons: the first, that a compositor, when correcting, inserted them in the text, making an astonishing sentence; the second, that the marked passage,—a piece of close, logical reasoning,—after being carefully scanned by the author, was brought to the reader, with a very earnest request that he would {p43} point out what justice there was in that bluff remark. It is enough to draw what beginners in writing call “straight marks” across the matter, and also in the margin. We append other—
MARKS USED IN CORRECTING PROOFS.
 | Insert an em-quadrat. |
 | Dele, take out; expunge. |
 | Insert space. |
 | Less space. |
 | Close up entirely. |
 | Dele some type, and insert a space in lieu of what is removed. |
 | Dele some type, and close up. |
 | Broken or battered type. |
 | Plane down a letter. Push down a space or quadrat. |
| . . . . | Placed under erased words, restores them. |
 | Written in the margin, restores a canceled word or passage, or such portions of erased text as have dots under them. |
 | Begin paragraph. |
 | Remove to left. |
 | Remove to right. |
 | Carry higher up on page. |
 | Carry down. |
 | Four lines subscript, denote italic capitals. |
 | Three lines subscript, denote capitals. |
 | Two lines subscript, denote small capitals. |
 | One line subscript, denotes italics. |
 | Wrong font. |
 | Transpose. |
 | Period. |
 | Colon. |
 | Apostrophe. |
| =/ | Hyphen. |
| –/ | En-dash. |
| |—| | Em-dash. |
| If there is an omission (an “out”) make a caret at the place of the out, and if the out is short, write the omitted word or words in margin; if long, write in margin “out—see copy,” and pin to the proof the sheet of copy containing the omitted portion. | |
 | Lower-case. |
 | Small capitals. |
 or  or  | calls attention to some doubtful word or sentence. |
Several other marks are used, which need no explanation.
In order to show our readers the practical application of the above marks, we will suppose the following paragraph from Guizot to be put in type abounding in errors, and will then exhibit the corrections as made by the proof-reader:
SPECIMEN OF FIRST PROOF.
