THE PROOFsREADER.

Inangahua Times, Volume II, 11 August 1880, Page 2

THE PROOFsREADER.

i. PATIENT MAS WHO OCCUPIES AN IMPOBTANT P.ISITION ON A JSEVVSPAPEB. The following which is .taken from the London. Hornet, i a a coo d account of the work and responsibilities of a proofs rea<W. The Hornet says : — The proofreader on a great daily journal is a very different being from the man associated* with projfs in the ordinary offines where the average weekly paper is printed. On the diilics the chief proof-reader is generally a man of educa* tion, and Often a broken down gentle* man. He is the son of a house which bos come to grief, or ha has constructed I i> own grief for himself. Having received a good grounding in a grammar school, be has passed some time in a respectable college, or perhaps be isa graduate of one of the universities. Anyway he has a fair acquaintance with Latin, some faint reminiscences of Greek, and a decent smattering of French. Beside which, he is well supplied with general information, and has a tenacious memory for names proper. He has also a quick eye for form, and can detect a turned s or i from a wron<r font, can tell at one glance the 1 from the I. and perceive when a line is too close or too white, or when a patch of type looks spotty. He must be a supreme master of that art which has no lisei laws, and which is more at the mercy of the individual than anj other —punctuation. I' may safely be asserted that no two writing men out of a hundred would punctuate a column of a moruing paper identically. The proof-reader on a good daily journal must be always able to j unctuate so that the matter may be ret d intellig bly, and when an author tries to insist on some unaccustomed form of ! pointing, the reader must be ready to fall back on the rules of the office, real or imaginary, to repress eccentricity. He must, of coarse, be perfect in spelling, or nearly so. His knowledge of "ramasar must be accurate, and he must have as quick a scent for doubtful or ambiguous grammar as any scboolm ster. Beyond grammar Lis domain reaches. He must have a moderate knowledge cf style, chiefly with a view to peispieuity. He must never allow a sentence he does not understsnd to pass him withiut querying it. .< The cry of 'fire!' in the front, the shout of ' murder ' in the backs of the place he works in, does not attract his attention half so mach ss a turned comma or a battered capital letter. All the other men may run lo the back to the front,- he will not s'ir^ There he sits, slowly fol« lowing the printed lines on the long proof slip, now and then asking the copy-holder 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 t'le mere art of copying and legal form, that his master bet a friend he w.u'd draw up a marmee settlement between Adam and Eve, keeping the items such as ■ would suit the condition of our first parenfs, that the clerk would copy it ouf, and detect nothing unusual in it. The settlement was drawn up vn ] handed to the clerk to copy. When the clerk was handing the clean draught back to his master, the latter said to him, 'Did you notice anything peculiar in that settlement F ' No,' answered the clerk. ' but it seems yjiy binding on the man's side.' One might go farther than this with the ordinary proofreader, and say that he would read the proof of an indictment ifor murder against himself with as little emotion as he would the proof of the multiplication table. Day after day he reads, and reads, and reads, seldom more than a quarter of an hour at a time the same matter. Now it is the title-page for a prayer-book, ihpn the advertisement of a hatter, then half a chapter of a story for boys about pirates, then a review of a new translation of Platus, then a portion of the prayer book, then a galley of 'spicy' '< paragraphs, then the advertisement of a nrw fill, 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 copy ;' that is. reads out in a dead level monotone the manuscript of wheh the printed slip is before the reader. From this manuscript the crushed b >y never lifts bis eye. Whether it is • comic copy ' or the account of an excitins fight belweeu pirates and Midshi;man Jack's command, that boy's tone never varies. On straight he goes, getting no more excited over the appetiz ne list of swe-'tmeais kept in tbe store tfian over the host of diseases which the pill r s able and anxious to stay. This man and boy never weep, never lauah. never smile, ot nny matter coming before them in the routine of their pro« f-ssinti. Like police magistrates they are wholly unmoved by anything they bear while on duty, but unlike police magistrate.*, they have no audiences, and would gain nothing by affecting the virtue of sympathy when they have it not.