CHAPTER XXI.
SUGGESTIONS TO INEXPERIENCED AUTHORS.
There is some economy and much convenience in buying your paper by the ream, (twenty quires,) having first tried a sample. The surface of the paper should be smooth, and somewhat glossy; particularly if you write with metallic pens. That which is soft and spongy, though a little lower in price, wears out the pen so fast that what is saved in paper is lost in pens; also, there is no possibility of writing on it with ease and expedition. You will find it best to use paper ruled in lines. If you write a large hand, take foolscap; if a small hand, use letter-paper size. But note-paper is too small, when you are writing for the press.
Before you commence your manuscript, take a quire, and prepare each sheet by splitting it all down the folded side, with a sharp paper-cutter, thus dividing it into half-sheets. You can do this better on a flat table than on the slope of a desk. Keep your left hand pressing down hard on the quire, while you are cutting it with your right.
The best paper-cutters are those of real ivory. A handle is of no advantage to them, but rather the contrary. They should be thin, plain, and perfectly straight, except being rounded off at the two ends. Ivory paper-knives of this form are generally used by the book-binders, an evidence that they are convenient and expeditious. Those of bone or horn are scarcely worth buying, though but half the price; the edges soon becoming blunt, and therefore useless. Wooden paper-knives are good for nothing. Paper-knives of mother of pearl, and other ornamental substances, are of little utility, being rarely sharp enough, (even when new,) and in a short time becoming quite dull. Also, they break very easily. Avoid cutting a sheet of paper, or the leaves of a book, with scissors; it is comparatively a slow and awkward process; and cannot, even with great care, be effected as smoothly and evenly as with a cutter of ivory.
Before you split or divide the sheet, press the paper-knife all along the fold, so as to flatten the crease, and make it cut evenly and easily. Having split your whole sheets into leaves or half-sheets, take each half-sheet separately, and fold over an inch or more all along the left-hand edge; so as to leave a margin or space for sewing the manuscript when finished. Do this with the paper-knife. Lay a pile of these half-sheets beside you when you sit down to write, and take them as you want them.
Write only on one side of the paper. If written on both sides, it will cause trouble and inconvenience to the printers, by obliging them to turn over at the end of every page. This rule, however, may be dispensed with, when a manuscript is so short that it may be comprised in one sheet, and is to be transmitted by mail. This may be the more easily managed, by drawing with a pencil or pen a straight perpendicular line down the middle of each page, so as to divide it into columns. When it is finished, enclose it in an envelope, direct, and seal it, and put on a post-office stamp. If the manuscript occupies two or three sheets, put two or three stamps side by side. There are large envelopes that will hold foolscap paper, properly folded.
Do not use blue ink; for if any part of your manuscript should chance to get wet, there is a risk of the blue ink being effaced or obliterated by the damp, so as to render the writing illegible; and this has frequently happened.
Let your writing be large enough, and plain enough to be read with ease, and the compositor will be less likely to make mistakes. Printers, though accustomed to read all sorts of writing, are sometimes completely at a loss in deciphering a very bad hand. There is no excuse for a person in respectable life persisting in writing illegibly, as it is never too late to improve. You have only to take lessons of a good instructor, and apply yourself sedulously to acquiring a new hand, and you will succeed in doing so.