THE “INTELLIGENT” COMPOSITOR

Globe, Volume II, Issue 148, 24 November 1874, Page 3

THE “INTELLIGENT” COMPOSITOR

This is Max Adder’s dedication to his new book, “ Out of the Hurly Burly My original intention was to dedicate this book to the friend of my boyhood, Azan ben Ghes, the Iraaum of Muscat, in memory of the happy days we played marbles in the Oman desert, and ducked each other in the Persian Gulf, and tortured inoffensive cats on the Island of Kishin. But 1 have changed my mind ; I have resolved to dedicate the book to a humorist who has had too little fame, to the most delicious, because the most unconscious humorist, to that widely scattered and multitudinous comedian who may be expressed in the concrete as the * intelligent compositor.’ To his faculty of perpetrating felicitous absurdities I am indebted for ‘ laughter that is worth a hundred groans. ’ It was he who, putting into type an article of mine which contained the injunction, ‘Do not cast your pearls before swine,’ transformed the phrase into ‘Do not cart your pills before sunrise.’ It was he who caused me to quote the poet’s inquiry so that I propounded to the world the appalling conundrum, ‘Where are the dead, the varnished dead ?’ And it was his glorious tendency to make the sublime convulsively ridiculous that rejected a line in a poem of mine which declared that a ‘ comet swept o’er the heavens with its trailing skirts,’ and substituted the idea that a ‘ count slept in a haymow in a travelling skirt.’ The kind of talent that is here displayed deserves profound reverence. It is wonderful and awful, and thus I offer it as a token of my marvelling respect.”