After pausing for a moment he continued, “It was your proofreadin’ that caught me. On that Rumford book your proofreader was a smart one, she was, but I got back at her in good style.”
His memory seemed to cause him considerable amusement, and I waited expectantly.
“It was in one of the genealogies,” he went on finally. “I gave the date of the marriage as so and so, and the date of the birth of the first child as two months later. Did she let that go by? I should say not. She drew a line right out into the margin and made a darned big question mark. But I got back at her! I just left that question mark where it was, and wrote underneath, ‘Morally incorrect, historically correct!’”
When the first Adams flat-bed press was installed at the University Press, President Felton of Harvard College insisted that no book of his should ever be printed upon this modern monstrosity. Here was history repeating itself, for booklovers of the fifteenth century in Italy for a long time refused to admit that a printed volume had its place in a gentleman’s library. In the eighteen-nineties one whole department at the University Press consisted of these flat-bed presses, which today can scarcely be found outside of museums. If a modern publisher were to stray into the old loft where the wetted sheets from these presses were hung over wooden rafters to dry, he would rub his eyes and wonder in what age he was living. The paper had been passed through tubs of water, perhaps half a quire at a time, and partially dried before being run through the press. The old Adams presses made an impression that could have been read by the blind, and all this embossing, together with the wrinkling of the sheet from the moisture, had to be taken out under hydraulic pressure. Today wetted sheets and the use of hydraulic presses for bookwork are practically obsolete. The cylinder presses, that run twice as fast, produce work of equal quality at lower cost.
In those days the relations between publishers and their printers were much more intimate. Scales of prices were established from time to time, but a publisher usually sent all his work to the same printer. It was also far more customary for a publisher to send an author to the printer to discuss questions of typography with the actual maker of the book, or to argue some technical or structural point in his manuscript with the head proofreader. The headreader in a large printing establishment at that time was a distinct personality, quite competent to meet authors upon their own ground.
One of my earliest and pleasantest responsibilities was to act as Mr. Wilson’s representative in his business relations with Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, which required frequent trips to “Pleasant View” at Concord, New Hampshire. Mrs. Eddy always felt under deep obligation to Mr. Wilson for his interest in the manuscript of Science and Health when she first took it to him with a view to publication, and any message from him always received immediate and friendly consideration.
In the past there have been suggestions made that the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, a retired Unitarian clergyman and long a proofreader at the University Press, rewrote Science and Health. Mr. Wiggin was still proofreader when I entered the Press, and he always manifested great pride in having been associated with Mrs. Eddy in the revision of this famous book. I often heard the matter referred to, both by him and by John Wilson, but there never was the slightest intimation that Mr. Wiggin’s services passed beyond those of an experienced editor. I have no doubt that many of his suggestions, in his editorial capacity, were of value and possibly accepted by the author,—in fact, unless they had been, he would not have exercised his proper function; but had he contributed to the new edition what some have claimed, he would certainly have given intimation of it in his conversations with me.