THE PROOF-READER.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2012, 5 August 1880, Page 2

THE PROOF-READER.

A PATIENT MAN WHO OCCUPIES AN IMPOBTAKT POSITION ON A NEWSPAPER. The following, which is taken from the London " Hornet," is a good account of the work and responsibilities of a proof-reader. The " Hornet" says : The proof-reader on a great daily journal is a very different being from the man associated with proofs in the ordinary c fflces where the average weekly paper is printed. On the dailies the chief proof-reader is generally a man of education, and often a broken-down gentleman. He is the son of a house which has come to grief, or he has constructed his own grief for himself. Having received a good grounding in a grammar school, he has passed some time in a respectable college, or perhaps he is a graduate of one of the universities. Anyway he has a fair acquaintance with Latin, some faint reminiscences of Grreek, and a decent smattering of French. Beside which, he is well supplied with general information, and has a tenacious memory for names proper. Ho has also a quick eye for form, and can detect a turned s or i from a wrong font, can tell at one glance tho 1 from the I, and perceive when a lino is too clobs or too white, or when a patch of type looks spotty. He must be a supreme master of that art which has no fixed laws, and which is more at the mercy of the individual than any other—punctuation. It may safely be asserted that no two writing men opt of a hundred would punctuate a column of a mornk-g paper identically. The proof-readar on a good daily journal must be always able to punctuate so that the matter may be read intelligibly, and when an author tries to insist on some unaccustomed form of pointing, the reader mus: be ready to fall back on the rules of the office, real or imaginary, to repress eccentricity. He must, of course, be perfect in spelling, or nearly so. His knowledge of grammar must be accurate, and he must have as quick a scent for doubtful or ambiguous grammar as any schoolmaster. Beyond grammar his domain reaches. He must have a moderate knowledge of style, chiefly with a view to perspicuity. He must never allow a sentence he does not understand to pass him without querying it. The cry of " fire ! " in the front, the shout of "murder" in the back of the place he works in, does not attract his attention half so much as a turned comma or a battered capital letter. All the other men may run to the back or the front, he will not stir. There he sits, slowly following the printed line on the long proof slip, now and then asking the copyholder a question, now and then making a hasty mark on the slip. There is a story told of an attorney's copying clerk, who was so subjugated to the mere art of copying and legal form, that his master bet a fi-iend he would draw up a marriage settlement between Adam and Eve, keeping the items such as would suit she condition of our first parents, that the clerk would copy it out, and detect nothing unusual in it. The settlement wasVlrawn up and handed to tho citrk to copy. When the clerk was handing the clean diaught back to his master, the letter said to him, " Did you notice anything peculiar in that settlement ? " "No," answered tho clerk, "but it seems very binding on the man's side." One might go farther than this with the ordinary proof-reader, and say that he would read the proof of an indictment for murder against himself with as little emotion as he would tho proof of the multiplication table. Day after day he reads, and reads, and reads, seldom more than a quarter of hour at a time the same matter. Now it is the title-page fore prayer-book, then tha advertisement of % hatter, then half a chapter of a Btory for boys about pirates, then a review of a new translation of Plautus, then a portion of the prayer book, then a galley of " spicy" paragraphs, then the advertisement of a new pill, followed by the list of diseases it is competent and anxious to cure. During all his labors he has for familiar a boy of melancholy voice and weak and gentle manners who "holds capy ;*' that is, reads out in a dead level monotone' the manuscript of which the printed slip is before the reader. From this manuscript the crushed boy never lifts ~:is eye. Whether it is " comic copy" or the account r>f an exciting fight between pirates and Midshipman Jack's command, that boy's tor.e never varies. On straight he goes, getting no more excited over the appetizing list of sweetmeats kept in the store than over the host of diseases which the pill is able and anxious to stay. This man and boy never weep, never laugh never smile, at any matter coming before them in the routine of their profession. Like police magistrates they are wholly unmoved by anything they hear while on duty, but unlike police magistrates, they have no audiences, and would gain nothing by affecting tho virtue of sympathy when they have it not.