PITY THE COMP!

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LVI, 29 December 1924, Page 8

PITY THE COMP!

MAN WHO DECIPHERS PUZZLES BAD WRITING—BAD LANGUAGE MAKING SENSE OF iIIEROGLY- ! PiIIGS Tile newspaper or general publishing compositor constitutes one oi tlie most tasumating and sacred characters in astolid world in which all must needs play a part. The public is seldom empowered to draw aside the veil which Hides him from the unappreciative gaze. The following brief story, therefore, should prove of particular interest. A hearty laugh upon occasion, even at the expense of one’s own particular craft, can have no worse effect than opening the heart, stretching tlie face muscles, and keeping down the doctors hill. At every turn in a printer’s day of toil do w'c encounter good and suliiicent causes for innocent merriment, and who shall blame us if we accept fullest advantage of the sunny moment? Above all else is bail copy a cause of laughter (as well, sometimes, as of tears). Poring over some undecipherable hand-written screed, the puzzled compositor is deserving of great pity, for it is up to him to make sense of tlie hieroglyphics, and not render the hide-eua-looking manuscript into a succession of howlers that would put to blush the average schoolboy. BADLY-WRITTEN COPY Bad writing is the. most prolific cause of bad language. Many have been the authors with a weakness for written copy, and many, too, have been the authors with a devastating fist for caligvaphy. Small wonder then that badlywritten copy has long been the bane of tho printer’s innocent life. He must often, unaided, decipher the puzzle himself, with what measure of success only the toiler at ease can adequately testify. Many are the provoking tales told of ( earnest compositors and badly-written copy- j BYRON’S GIN j One of the .best of those delectable stories iis a. chestnut well worth repetition. "I eanna male it oot,” growled a j "Scottish compositor of the late Professor Elackio’s MS. “But,” he added pawki- j ly, "if I had ma pipes nac doot I could j play ’t!” Byron, whose centenary ce- 1 lebrations have recently been observed , by tho faithful, was a- terror to poor _ harassed printers. It is said that no . composed Don Juan on gin and water, ) after nights spent at the theatre. j z When the poem was completed hfc | practically re-wrote it again in proof, j so many were the alterations made by additions and interlining—this, too, in no respectable handwriting. The first , copy of the poem, The Giaour, consisted of four hundred lines ; this'number lie eventually swelled by correction, to ; some fourteen hundred. In The Bride of Abydos he altered quite two bund/ ! led lines, and the compositors made the dfiy hideous with lamentations, One supposes this frailty to be one of the perquisites of genius! NAT. HAWTHORNE Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote such bad j scrawl that to this day some of his writings remain unpublished for the very i simple reason that they are undecipherable by compositors, than whom, in these intricate niatlei's, there exist no finer experts. One witty comp, remarked of Horace Greeley’s handwriting that if Belshazzar had seen such writing on the wall he would have been ii'VCti -more..terrified than jie was. Carlyle, Balzac, Stanley, Payn, Burnahv, v and Robert Louis Stevenson, with many another equally famous in the realm of letters, evoked much strong language fi oui unfortunate compositors called upon to translate their magic sentences in- 1 to the fairest of legible roman that all may read ns they run. j NAPOLEON’S~LOVE LETTERS But the worst of all writers, surely, must have been Napoleon, one of whose love-letters to Josephine was found by Marshal Murat and seriously studied as i a plan of campaign. And, -to conclude, there have been writers who have been j totally unable to understand their own J writing. So say compositors, and their* word, must he law on the intriguing sub jeet. It awaits the coming of the laureate of typography to indite an Ode to the advent of the .beneficent typewriter !