Note 30 — Chapter VII · THE “GREAT UNKNOWN”

Many manuscripts of modern authors are execrable, and little care is taken to make what is written plain and intelligible, resulting in “errors of the press,” though, owing to the vigilance of the press reader, comparatively few of these meet the eye of the public. In the preparation of their “copy” lawyers of high repute will leave technical and foreign terms in a truncated or misspelt way; divines frequently show an aversion to both punctuation marks and capitals, the omission of which would bring scorn and contempt upon the compositor and the reader. Many instances of faulty manuscripts could be cited. A few will suffice. A learned professor in a northern university wrote in such a shocking spidery hand that the men were paid a third more for putting it in type; a divine, long since gone over to the majority, wrote his sermons on any scrap of paper he got hold of—old bills, torn envelopes, &c.—and thus caused an infinity of labour in arranging these oddments in a readable way. If any particular bit got transposed from its proper place, it did not appear to matter very much; it was as well there as anywhere else. Similar to this was a famous writer, well known at Paul’s Work, who, prior to his morning prowl among old bookshops, would fill his pockets with scraps of paper—envelopes and such-like—on which he noted the particulars of his daily finds; and these were afterwards sent to the printer to be arranged for a book. Another reverend writer, whose works were many and sold well, would take a quarto sheet of paper to write on—beginning with a narrow centre column for the first draft of his subject; to this would be added afterthoughts by branching lines to the centre column, till the whole sheet was full—like a rushing river gathering in fresh supplies from meandering rivulets on either side of its course. But this topic is a wide and curious one, and instances might be given where an author was unable to read his own “copy,” and had to see a proof of what could be set in type before he was able to remedy an unreadable passage or supply an obscure or missing word.