“LOCKING UP.”

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 47, 22 May 1862, Page 6 (Supplement)

“LOCKING UP.”

It is pleasant to lock up your money box when you loci that its contents have been well earned. Locking the stable door when the horse is gone is not quite so satisfactory. Locking up the counting-house, for the last time prior to your annual summer holiday, has agreeable sensations. There is much that is gratifying about locking your door on a winter's night, and leaving cold and damp and wind and drear}' thoughts in the street —if you don't get troubled in your mind about some poor wretch who may seek "the shelter of your door step, lint the most interesting and generally most agreeable locking up newspaper people feel is a locking up about which the general public know little or nothing. One of the most important phases through which a newspaper travels in the course of production is its “locking up.” You don't know what I mean, Mrs. Partington? You think it strange that a newspaper should bo locked up prior to publication, Mrs. P. ? If you lived next door to a publishing ollice which sent forth a newspaper at an early hour in the morning, yon would goon know what locking up is. 'When you were suddenly aroused from a refreshing slumber by a knocking and a hammering and a clamouring, and you asked your venerable Mr. P. what in the world that dreadful noise was, he would tell you (if he knows anything about such things) that the printers were locking up. And when this knocking was succeeded by a dragging about of some heavy material and a shuffling of feet, and then another knocking of a shorter duration than the former, he -would tell you the forms were on the machine. [No, Mrs. P., the forms are not to sit upon.] And when you were sensible of a bumping and a rolling and a rattling of machinery, he would tell you “ they are at press”—one of the very few blissful moments in the labour of those who conduct newspapers. When the editor has written his multifarious ideas and supervised and edited the contributions of his crowd of correspondents ; when the reporters have transcribed the Inst of their notes, and all this has gone through the compositor’s hands, and grown into columns of dull-looking type ; when this has been read and corrected, and arranged under its respective heads of foreign news, literature, general, local, &c. ; when some of it lias been printed off, and the last pages are being made ready for the press ; then comes the period of locking up, which all concerned in the production of the paper look forward to all the time between each diurnal or weekly issue. This locking up is the fastening safely together the columns of the paper in iron frames, which printers call chases the completion of which operation releases what may be called the thinking part of the establishment.. and leaves nothing to be done but the mere mechanical work of printing the paper and sending it forth to the world. The process of locking up is accompanied by much hammering with mallets and much planing with planers, in order that the typo may adhere firmly together, and be even on tlie surface. Bells chiming on a summer evening,

the melody of birds, the whispering of the winds through trees in summer, the rippling murmur of running brooks, make charming music, but after (he fatigues and anxieties of a publication day in a newspaper office, the clamor and clash of locking up is sweeter and more soothing than either bell music, bird music, brook music, or any other kind of music whatsoever. To one uninitiated in the mysteries of the art which Caxton did so much to perfect, the extraordinary commands and inquiries of the overseer, whose duty it is to “make up,” as the final arrangement of the types before going to press is called, would be exceedingly puzzling, and sometimes ludicrous. “ Who’s on that horrible tragedy ?” is a query somewhat startling in its nature, as is also the command to “ finish that dreadful murder, which is keeping two galleys waiting.” [Galleys, by the by, are what I may call frames, made sometimes of w'ood, mostly of metal, to receive the type, before it is placed in the iron embrace of the “chases”—very different things, Mrs. P., either to ships of the galleys where crime is punished in France.] But these are ordinary commands and interrogations in a printing office, a short time before locking up, let I have seen a stranger standing in utter bewilderment at a running lire such as this—“ Let that ‘ Colliery Accident be revised, and pull that ‘French Ambassador in Turkey,’ and set up ‘An outlawed Bankrupt,’ in brevier caps ; finish that ‘Great Battle between the Austrians and the Allies,’ ” and a host of similarlv inexplicable orders frum overseers to typos ; whilst the reader asks for a proof of “ The explosion in a Coal Mine,” ns though he wanted to see a collection of dead bodies and mangled limbs ; and the editor, intent on his leaders, demands another proof of “ The Settlement of the Eastern Question” (as though he very much doubted such a desirable consummation), at the same time suggesting that the “ cross head” of Mr. shall bo replaced by a “full head,” which, by the by,is anything but a reflection on the intellectual powers or congenial temper of that distinguished statesman, however paradoxical this statement may seem in connection with the suggested re-arrangoment of Mr. Gladstone’s cranium. I can assure my readers that this settlement of Eastern questions, this finishing of murders, this revising of accidents, and proofs of awful calamities, is perfectly intelligible to the printers, and means anything but the committal of dreadful deeds, or the final arrangement of European questions. And such commands and observations do not create a laugh from their apparent extravagance, but the work goes on auiidst'jhe blazing glare of gas with wonderful speed, everybody intent on what he has in hand, until those great chases are put round the long leaden columns of and the loeking-up begins. Then faces relax from their previous sternness ; compositors wipe the perspiration from their brows; editors, subs, reporters, put on their cloaks and take up their walking-sticks, and light their cigars and go homo, and soon afterwards the newspaper—the history of the world for a day or a week, os (he case may be—the story of our progress and civilization, our crimes our charities, our battles, our victories, our sins of omission ami commission—is in the hands of a crowd of readers,-perhaps not one of whom ever thinks about the labor of head and hand the broad wet sheet has cost its producers. — Provincial Papers , by J. Hatton.