I entered on my duties in a blissful ignorance of the trials that awaited me. I did not know how to “put a head” on an article or a selected “reprint.” I know nothing of the hieroglyphics necessary to let the printer know the various kinds of typo in which my headings should be set up. I did not realize that the writer’s manuscript must be, in a sense, ground through the editor’s mill and go through a certain process before being put in the printer’s hands. I did know that something was to be done, but the extent of that something I did not know. Of the signs to be placed on manuscript to show whether the type used should be “brevier” or “minion” or “agate,” or those to designate “full-face caps” for my upper headings and “full-face lower case” for my lower headings, of a “display heading,” of “balancing the columns,” nor that the headings on a page should not be jammed up together or too far apart. I was in that condition of ignorance that the smallest part of a printer was justified in looking down on me with contempt.
N. B.—In the composing room a printer is a much larger-sized Indian than a mere writer.
You who read the instructive and entertaining columns of ghastliness, accident, and crime in your morning paper—you who are unfortunately or otherwise neither writers nor printers, you think you could easily write one of those staring sensational headings over the article which tell all about it before you read it and whet your appetite for reading it. But you might not. It is not so much the literary ability needed. It is the printer who stands in the way. It is the printer who must have just so many words for one kind of “head” and so many for another. You must get your sense, sensation, and information condensed into say twenty-four or twenty-six words for one part of the “head” and ten or twelve for another part, and these must neither run over nor run under these numbers. If they do and the spaces are uneven that issue of the paper would, in that printer’s estimation, be ruined. If you, the editor, do not “make up” your pages so that the columns “balance,” the paper, for him, would be a wreck. The foreman of the composing room values a newspaper for its typographical appearance. This is right. A paper, like a house, should look neat. Only the foreman need not forget that there is something in the articles besides types. The magnate of our composing room called all written matter “stuff.” “What are you going to do with this stuff?” he would remark, and he used to put such an inflection of contempt on that word “stuff” that it would have made any but an old tough writer sick to hear him. Poems literally perspiring with inspiration, beautiful descriptive articles reeking with soul and sentiment, lively humor, manuscript written and re-written so lovingly and carefully—children of many a brilliant brain—all with him was but “stuff”!
During all the years that I had been writing I had bestowed no attention on the “making up” of a paper. I had a vague idea that the paper made up itself. I had passed in my articles, and had seen them in their places a few hours later, and never dreamt that the placing of these, so that the columns should end evenly or that the page should not look like a tiresome expanse of unbroken type, required study, taste, and experience.
I was aroused from this dream when first called on to “make up” my eight-page supplement. Of course, the foreman expected me to go right on like an old hand, and lay out in the printed form where the continued story should be and how many columns it should fill, where the foreign correspondence and illustrated articles should appear, where the paste pot and scissored matter, shorter articles, and paragraphs should be, so that the printer could place his galleys in the form as marked out per schedule.
I was confronted within a single week with all this mass of my own editorial and typographical ignorance, and even more than can here be told. It had not before dawned upon me that an editor should be—well, we will say, the skeleton of a printer. I was not even the ghost of one. I was not before aware that in the recesses of editorial dens and composing rooms the printer stood higher than the writer. “Everybody” writes nowadays. But “everybody” does not set type or “make up” papers.
I saw then what I had done. I saw that I had rashly assumed to govern a realm of which I was entirely ignorant. I made a full and free confession to our foreman. I put myself before him as an accomplished ignoramus. He was a good fellow and helped me through. It was tough work, however, for several weeks. As Sunday came nearer and nearer, my spasms of dread and anxiety increased. I was seized in the dead of night with fears lest I had not sent up sufficient “stuff” to fill my forty-six columns. Then I would be taken with counter fears lest I had sent up too much, and so run up an overplus on the week’s composing bill. I worried and fretted so that by Saturday night I had no clear idea at all or judgment in the matter, and let things take their own course.
But the hardest task of all was dealing with the mourners—I mean the manuscript bearers. I found myself suddenly inside of the place, where I had so often stood outside. I was the man in the editorial chair, the arbiter of manuscript destiny, the despot who could accept or reject the writer’s article. But I was very uncomfortable. I hated to reject anybody’s writings, I felt so keenly for them. I had so many times been there myself. I wished I could take and pay for everybody’s manuscript. But I could not. The requirements of the paper stood like a wall ’twixt my duty and my sympathy. The commands from the management allowed only a certain amount to be expended weekly for original articles. I felt like a fiend—an unwilling one—as I said “No” time after time and sent men and women away with heavy hearts. In cases I tried even to get from the rejected a little sympathy for myself. I told them how hard it was for me to say “No.” I tried to convince them that mine was a much harder lot than theirs, and that mine was by far the greater misery.