Shaw's meticulous proofreading is indicated by this heavily-corrected proof of On the Rocks, with a complete retyping of the passage below.
Shaw's method, probably verging on the diabolical to Dr. Chapman, is to write everything first in shorthand. A double-spaced typescript then becomes his working copy, to be sent to the printer only after careful emendation and revision, in Shaw's always clear hand.
The manuscripts, typescripts, galley, page and final press proofs, indeed the whole apparatus of the Shavian "workshop" in William Maxwell's collection, show the great pains Shaw takes in writing and revising before setting. His meticulous proof reading is as characteristic as the clarity of his proof correction. William Maxwell tells me that Shaw's first-proof corrections are often heavy, sometimes involving considerable re-setting and re-make-up. But wherever lengthy excisions or additions are made in final proofs, Shaw is always careful to supply the exact number of words; sometimes in shorter corrections counting individual letters in substituted words in order to avoid over-running and re-justification.
By all the standards of Horace Hart and Howard Collins, Shaw would qualify as an admirable and expert author in the technical aspect of his relations with his printer—except, perhaps, for Dr. Chapman's scholarly strictures on prefatorial prolixity and diabolonian authorship.
Shaw's plays are drafted in what he calls Author's Shorthand (simplified Pitman); typed by his secretary; revised; printed; and passed for press after two more revisions. For rehearsal, fifty copies are struck off as "By a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature." If more are required they are "By Bernard Shaw." These sets are "privately printed." Alterations and additions in rehearsal and during the run of the play are incorporated as final corrections before publication.
One of the most interesting Shaw exhibits in William Maxwell's possession is the original of the filmscript of Pygmalion. Shaw allowed no hand but his own on the scripts of his films. The corrected copy of the play, with alterations in dialogue and time scheme for the screen and the additional scenes and sequences, is in itself remarkable visual evidence of Shaw's nimble-witted inventiveness. Few playwrights at the age of eighty-five have tackled so successfully the transition into another medium, cooperating with director and producer to present in all its freshness and verve the authentic Shavian touch on both sound-track and screen.
The original edition, the Limited Collected edition, the Standard edition, form the bulk of Shaw's printed works; his printed ephemera are not my concern here. There are, however, various editions of what we might call out-of-the-run-plays-and-prefaces books: The Intelligent Woman's Guide, Everybody's Political What's What, the two-column quarto editions of the Prefaces and The Complete Plays, the illustrated Black Girl, the illustrated Good King Charles's Golden Days (there was also an illustrated edition of Geneva printed by the Chiswick Press) and the illustrated Penguin edition of Pygmalion. "Omnibus" editions of the Plays and Prefaces have been published by Odhams, cheap editions by Penguin; and Back to Methuselah by the Oxford University Press in World's Classics. The Odhams omnibus was reprinted from Shaw's plates; the Penguin editions were re-set in Times.
The Intelligent Woman was instructed in Caslon on a page dimension decided by William Maxwell; a binding design by Douglas Cockerell; and a four-colour half-tone jacket from an original drawing by Eric Kennington of a nude female Intelligencer looking down a well. She, needless to add, had a much less shapely figure than the Black Girl.
The typography of The Intelligent Woman's Guide (1928) is in the Caslon formula. We need only note in passing that the drop initials at the beginning of chapters are tightly fitted and spill over into the margins. The binding suggests that too much Cockerell can spoil a trade binding. The jacket was regrettable: the externals of this book seem out of character with the rest of Shaw's production. A more acceptable popular edition, printed from the same plates, with reduced margins in small demy octavo, was published a year later in 1929.