Intelligent Compositor

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 108, 2 March 1893, Page 3

Intelligent Compositor

The San Francisco Chronicle of a recent date demotes a leading article to the •'lntelligent compositor," from j which we extract the following : — Let us see what the compositor can do and does do every day of his life. He takes a manuscript the chirography of which would make the lid of a Chinese tea cheat blush with envy, translates it into the vernacular as he goes along, corrects the spelling and the grammar, and oftentimes the rhetoric, and turns it out not as the author wrote it, but as he intended to write it. He sets up better English than most men can write ; he can detect errors of fact as well as of style ; he can give the horse editor points on sporting matters, and a religious editor on theology ; he can appreciate even tho merits of a discussion on the tariff, and detect the fallacies in a profound leader on economics ; and he can do more hard and intelligent work in a given time than any other sort of handicraftsman. Setting off, then, bis eccentricities and idiosyncrasies against his fund of general information, his knowledge of a wide range of subjects, and his ability to discriminate between good and bad literary work, it is surely no misnomer to call him the •intelligent' compositor.