PUZZLE ELUCIDATORS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4797, 9 January 1925, Page 3

PUZZLE ELUCIDATORS.

BADWRITING—BAD LANGUAGE. TRIALS OF THE COMPOSITOR. The newspaper or general publishing compositor constitutes one of the imst fascinating and sacred characters in a solid 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 paritcular interest. A hearty laugh upon occasion, even at tne expense of one’s own particular craft, can have no effect than open-ng the heart, stretching the face muscles, and keeping down the doctor's bill. At every turn in a printer’s day of toil do we encounter good and sufficient cause for innocent merriment, and who shall blame us if we accept fullest advantage of the sunny ■moment ? Above all else is bad 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 the hieroglyphics, and not render the hideous-looking manuscript into a succession of howlers that would put to blush the average schoolboy. Bad writing is the most prolific cause of bad Many have been the authors with a weakness for written copy, and many, too, have been the authors with a devastating fist for caligraphy. Small wonder, then, that badly-written copy has long been the bane of the printer’s innocent life. He must often decipher the puzzle himself with what measure of success only the toiler at case can adequately testify. Many are the provoking .tales told of earnest compositors and badly-written copy. One of the best of those delectable doriee is a chestnut well worth repetition. “I canna mak it cot,” growled a Scottish compositor of the late Professor Blackie’s MS. “But,” he added pawkily, “if I had ma pipes nae doot I could play it I” Byron, whose ’centenary celebrations have recently 'been observed by' the faithful, was a terror to poor harassed printers. "it is said that he composed Don Juan on gin and water, after nights spent at the theatre. When the poem was completed he practically re-wrote it again in proof, so many were the alterations made by auditions and interlining—this, too, in no respectable handwriting. The first copy of the poem, The Giaour,” consisted of four hundred lines ; this number.he eventually swelled by correction. to some fourteen hundred. In the “Bride of, Abydos” he altered quite two hundred lines, and the compositor made the day hideous with lame niations. One supposes this frailty to be one of the perquisites of genius! Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote such bad scrawl that to this day some of his wiilings remain unpublished for the very’ simple reason that they are undecipherable by compositors, than whom, in these , intricate matters, there exist no finer experts. One witty con i- remarked of Horace Greeley’s hamlwi iting that if Belshazzar had seen such writing on the wall he would have been even more terrified than lie was., Carlyle, Balzac, Stanley, Payne, Burnaby, and Robert Louis Stevenson, with many another equally fame us in the realm of letters, evoked much strong language from unfortunate compositons called upon to translate their magic sentences into the fairest of legible roman that all may read as they run. But the worst of all writers, surely, must have been Napoleon, one of whose love-letters to Josephine w r as found by Marshal Murat and seriously studied as a plan of campaign. And, to conclude, there have been writers who have been totally unable to understand their own writing. So say compositors, and their word must be law on the intriguing subject.