The Intelligent Compositor

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 79, 2 January 1892, Page 2

The Intelligent Compositor

The San Francisco Chronicle -of la recent date devotes a lead?ngf krticle to the '• intelligent compositor," from which we extract the following: — " Let us sed; what, the compositor can do and' does do every day of his life. He takes a manuscript, the chiro. graphy of which would . make tlielid of a Chinese tea chest blush with envy, translates it into the vernacular as he goes along, correctW^her spelling and the grammar, and oftentimes the rhetoric, and turns It out not as the author wrote it but as Jie iatends to write it. He sets up ' Hotter English than most men ckn. writl, he can detect errors, of fact as well as, of style ; he can give the horse editor points on sporting matter 3, c ana the religious editor on theology-; ?he can apprepiate even the : merits of ; dis- v acusspn on the tariff, and detect the fallacies in a profound leader on economies ; and he can dp more hard and intelligent work in a given time than any other sort of handicraftsman. Setting ofi, then, . his^ eoeentricities and idiosyncrasies against his I fund of general information, . hjs ! knowledge of a wide range of sub- j jects, and his ability to disbriminate between good and bad litprary v.brk,, j it is surely no misnomer : it6 call him the ' intelligent ' comppsitor/'