The Blacksmith's Work

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 126, 21 April 1892, Page 4

The Blacksmith's Work

The machine printer, or ' blacksmith ' as he is technically called, is a %niliar figure in every printingoffice. It is he who makes a hurried guess at the copy before him, without csring* whether it makes sense or not — who substitutes ' cone ic ' for'cosmic,' ' human ' for * known,' ' plant ' for ' planted, ' 'I am better ' for 'Gambetia, ' *no cows, no cream ' lor 'no cross, no crown, ' and * shaving 1 the queen ' for * shoving the queer .' This is the sort of printer who made a distinguished traveller die in the ' richness of sin ' instead of the ' interior of Asia,' and who described a Chicago exquisire as one whose * manners would alarm a drowning man,' when what the writer really said was that l they would adorn a drawing-room.' Richard A. Proctor records the most remarkable change the printers ever arranged for him as occurring in the proof of a little book on ' Spectroscope Analysis.' which he wrote for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The words which in the work itself now appear, as they were certainly written,' lines band and stria in the violet part of spectra,' were printed in the proof, * Links, bonas and stripes for the violent kind of spectres,' An editor who wished to compliment a soldier as ' a battle scarred veteran * was so deeply grieved when he found that that the types had made him speak of * a battle scared, veteran ' that the next day he inserted an apology and an erratum which read ' the bottle scarred veteran. ' • I remember/ says a writQr in * American Notes and Queries,' 'to have written something about a ooncert at which was sung Millard's Aye Maria,' and it actually appeared that Miss So-and-So had sung with much feeling Mulligan's ' Ayenue Maria.' At a musical party in the same neighbourhood a young lady pbiyed upon a piano a ballad in A flat major. The local paper had it that she had sung a ballad called ' A Fat Major.'—lllustrated American.