The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy—
were converted into nonsense by the simple change of Troy into Tory. ‘In a short biographical notice of Pope which I compiled for an edition of his poems, I briefly enumerated his prose works, among which I named his Memoirs of a Parish Priest; when the proof came before me, I found that the compositor had set it Memoirs of a Paint Brush.’ It is possible that this blunder may have arisen from a cause to which we shall presently advert, obscure writing in the author’s manuscript; but Mr Martin also took notice of the matter mentioned above, namely the partial disarrangement of some of the types in the cells, as a cause of typographical bewilderment.
This misplacing of types in cells would fail, however, to account for a multitude of blunders. The author, the compositor, and the ‘corrector of the press’ must be responsible on other grounds for ‘A silver medal given to a florist for stealing geraniums;’ and for putting a wrong date on the tops of some of the pages of a newspaper—such as the Daily News in one of its issues, which put ‘Monday July 18th’ on the top of one page, and ‘Tuesday July 18th’ on the top of all the others; and in a quite recent instance in the Illustrated London News, where on the top of one page Saturday was assigned to a date that certainly did not belong to it. At the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852, Sir Peregrine Maitland was one of the pall-bearers. A statement appeared in some of the journals to the effect that when Sir Archibald Alison published the last volume of his History of Europe, the name of Sir Peregrine Maitland appeared as Sir Peregrine Pickle; and it was remarked that such a misprint could not have been otherwise than intentional, a poor attempt at a joke on the part of the compositor, or the ‘corrector.’ In the only copy which we have consulted, this absurdity does not appear—a negative testimony so far as it goes in favour of the compositor.
The wrong placing of words in lines, and lines in columns or pages, is an instance of careless ‘making-up,’ for which the compositor in the first place is clearly responsible, but which as certainly ought to be detected in the proof by the corrector. Nevertheless, the examples of this are manifold. Sometimes a whole line is transferred higher up or lower down the page than the proper place; and at others one single word makes an excursion to a line where no reader would look for it. We notice, for instance, in one of the magazines for September 1877 the word see is used where it has no meaning; twelve lines lower down occurs the word They where it has no meaning; but on transposing the two words, nonsense becomes converted into sense. A practical printer could tell us how such an error might arise in the technical management of his ‘composing-stick’ and ‘form;’ but to outsiders it is well-nigh incomprehensible.
It was a little too bad in the printers of a Cambridge Bible, published some years back, that such a line should appear as ‘I will never forgive thy precepts.’ Here there was no writer nor transcriber concerned; the compositor made the blunder, and the press-reader passed it without detection; because as new editions of the Bible, unless newly annotated, are copied from the print of a previous edition, no manuscript is needed. A somewhat trifling error, though puzzling in its result, occurs in spacing the words: the last letter or syllable of one word is inadvertently placed at the beginning of the next, or else the first is placed at the end of the preceding word. When a lady is said, in a recent novel, to ‘rush down-stairs without stretched arms,’ we know what is meant; but the corrector ought not to have passed such a slip unnoticed. On one occasion—perhaps one among many—a foot-note is incorporated in the body of the page, throwing the whole sense of a paragraph into utter confusion. A printer will know how this may occur, in arranging his lines into pages; but what is the corrector about?
The most trying part perhaps of a compositor’s duty is to decipher the writing of some authors whose manuscripts have to be set up in type. No one can conceive, merely judging from the interchange of ordinary letters between relations and acquaintances, the large amount of badly written manuscript which reaches the printing-offices. And it is known that some of our most eminent authors, whose veritable words are regarded as more important than those of other men, are great sinners in this respect; they torment the compositor with specimens of the art of penmanship almost hopelessly unintelligible. Our readers will find this part of the subject—that is the misprints that are due wholly to the bad writing of the author or amanuensis, and not to carelessness shewn by the compositor or the corrector—fully illustrated by examples in the article ‘Wretched Writers’ in this Journal for March 14, 1874. The late Horace Greeley, the distinguished American, is pictured in that article as about the worst penman that ever disturbed the peace of a compositor.
A word or two about correctors and correcting. When the compositor has set up and arranged matter enough for say a sheet, a ‘proof’ is pulled at the hand-press, and the ‘first reader’ is employed to examine it closely for the detection of any technical errors; then, with the aid of a ‘reading-boy,’ he compares the paragraphs, one after another, with the author’s manuscript, corrects as he goes on by means of marginal marks on the proof, and queries any doubtful word or passage to which he wishes to draw the author’s attention. The compositor makes all the corrections suggested by this ‘first reader,’ and for common cheap kinds of printing this is enough; but for better work, a ‘second reader’ is employed to correct not merely the compositor but to advise even the author in regard to badly chosen words or badly arranged sentences—an intellectual revision, in fact, often performed by men who sometimes themselves afterwards rise to distinction as authors. The perplexities that beset the printer’s reader were pretty fully set forth thirteen years ago in the Journal; and we need say nothing more on that subject. What with the reading-boy, the first reader, and the second reader, we see that there are many possible responsibilities for misprints besides those due to the author, the copyist or amanuensis, and the compositor. An impartial distribution of blame is hence desirable so far as it can be done.
[NATURE’S TEACHINGS.]
In a curious and instructive book which we have just read, entitled Nature’s Teachings, by Mr Wood, we are shewn that scientific inventions, no matter how original and ingenious they may appear to be, have each and all been anticipated in the world of nature.