Misprints, errors of the press, printers’ blunders, typographical mistakes—call them what we may—are so numerous that every reader meets with them occasionally. Budgets of ludicrous examples are now and then given in the popular journals; and these budgets might be greatly extended. Our Journal gave its quota more than thirty years ago; and the matter was again touched upon in the volume for 1872.

Many errors consist in the omission of a single letter in a single word, altering the sense most materially. Thus, an omission of the letter t, in a work by Dr Watts, made immortal into immoral; and other grotesque instances of this kind of error could be given. The heedless substitution of one letter for another, without exceeding or falling short of the proper number of letters in the word, is a very frequent form of blunder. ‘Bring him to look’ is a poor version of ‘bring him to book.’ A candidate at an election certainly did not mean, as a newspaper implied, that he fully expected to come in ‘at the top of the pole.’ A compositor, perhaps a learner, being unable to make out a Greek word of three letters, set them down as the three numerals to which they bore some resemblance in shape, namely 185. At a public demonstration the mob rent the air with their snouts. Dr Livingstone’s cap, as worn when Mr Stanley met him in the heart of Africa, was said in one of the papers to have been ‘famished with a gold-lace band.’ In old English printing, the syllable con was often contracted to something like the shape of the figure 9; and this numeral is to be found in many books, even standard works, where it has no right whatever; in one edition of the Monasticon Anglicanum for instance, the word conquest is represented as 9quest. There are both a wrong letter used and a letter omitted in the startling statement, that a right reverend prelate was highly pleased with some ecclesiastical iniquities shewn to him.

A useful question has been asked, and to some extent discussed, whether several of the above-cited misprints of single letters, or others similar to them, may not be due to the arrangement of the compositor’s working apparatus? Mr Keightley suggested, a few years ago, that possibly some of the varied readings of passages in Shakspeare might be due to the compositor dipping his fingers into the wrong cell, and others to the fact that wrong types have got into the right cell. Most persons who have visited any of the printing establishments are aware that the compositor’s types are placed in flat cases provided with a number of small cells or receptacles, each for one particular letter of one particular class of type. There are two cases, one called the upper and the other the lower; the former being for the capitals, the latter for the small letters. Both cases are placed before the compositor, inclining upwards from front to back, the upper more inclined than the lower. The cells are not ranged in regular alphabetical order, but in such manner that those containing the letters most wanted shall be grouped together near the compositor’s hand, leaving such letters as j, k, q, x, z, &c. to occupy cells near the margin of the case. May not some types fall out of an overfilled cell into the one just below it; or may not the filling of a pair of cases with new type be so carelessly managed that a few fall over into the wrong cells; or may the compositor, in distributing the type after printing, now and then drop a type into a wrong cell?

A practical printer will answer such a question in the affirmative. The letters b and l, for instance, being in contiguous cells, one may fall or slip down into the cell belonging to the other, which might be the cause of ‘bring him to book’ being changed into ‘bring him to look.’ The old form of type for the double letter st is believed to have led to many misprints—such as nostrils being expressed stostrils, in a Bible printed in the early part of the present century. Whether the types were arranged in the cases a hundred or two hundred years ago in the same order and manner as at present, might be worth a little investigation—in so far as any change of arrangement may have rendered either more or less frequent such misprints as would arise from the falling over of some of the types into wrong cells. There are now something like a hundred and fifty cells in a pair of cases for ordinary book and newspaper printing; even if there were the same number in former times, it does not necessarily follow that the arrangement of the rank and file would be the same.

Benjamin Franklin, when a young man, refused to give ‘garnish’ or ‘pay his footing,’ on being placed in a room of compositors; because he had already responded to a demand for similar blackmail in another department of the printing-office. They took a peculiar method of punishing him, by disarranging some of the types in his cells when he was out of the room. Very likely this technical tribulation may have led him inadvertently to the committal of numerous misprints. Several years ago Mr H. Martin, of Halifax, adverted to a typographical error in a former communication of his to one of the journals, and added: ‘Upwards of thirty years’ experience in connection with the press has taught me to be very lenient towards misprints. The difficulty of detecting typographical errors is much greater than the uninitiated are inclined to believe. I have often observed that, even if the spelling be correct, a wrong word is very apt to remain undetected.’ He notices an instance in an edition of Shakspeare’s Merchant of Venice, where Portia’s lines—

were converted into nonsense by the simple change of Troy into Tory. ‘In a short biographical notice of Pope which I compiled for an edition of his poems, I briefly enumerated his prose works, among which I named his Memoirs of a Parish Priest; when the proof came before me, I found that the compositor had set it Memoirs of a Paint Brush.’ It is possible that this blunder may have arisen from a cause to which we shall presently advert, obscure writing in the author’s manuscript; but Mr Martin also took notice of the matter mentioned above, namely the partial disarrangement of some of the types in the cells, as a cause of typographical bewilderment.

This misplacing of types in cells would fail, however, to account for a multitude of blunders. The author, the compositor, and the ‘corrector of the press’ must be responsible on other grounds for ‘A silver medal given to a florist for stealing geraniums;’ and for putting a wrong date on the tops of some of the pages of a newspaper—such as the Daily News in one of its issues, which put ‘Monday July 18th’ on the top of one page, and ‘Tuesday July 18th’ on the top of all the others; and in a quite recent instance in the Illustrated London News, where on the top of one page Saturday was assigned to a date that certainly did not belong to it. At the Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852, Sir Peregrine Maitland was one of the pall-bearers. A statement appeared in some of the journals to the effect that when Sir Archibald Alison published the last volume of his History of Europe, the name of Sir Peregrine Maitland appeared as Sir Peregrine Pickle; and it was remarked that such a misprint could not have been otherwise than intentional, a poor attempt at a joke on the part of the compositor, or the ‘corrector.’ In the only copy which we have consulted, this absurdity does not appear—a negative testimony so far as it goes in favour of the compositor.

The wrong placing of words in lines, and lines in columns or pages, is an instance of careless ‘making-up,’ for which the compositor in the first place is clearly responsible, but which as certainly ought to be detected in the proof by the corrector. Nevertheless, the examples of this are manifold. Sometimes a whole line is transferred higher up or lower down the page than the proper place; and at others one single word makes an excursion to a line where no reader would look for it. We notice, for instance, in one of the magazines for September 1877 the word see is used where it has no meaning; twelve lines lower down occurs the word They where it has no meaning; but on transposing the two words, nonsense becomes converted into sense. A practical printer could tell us how such an error might arise in the technical management of his ‘composing-stick’ and ‘form;’ but to outsiders it is well-nigh incomprehensible.

It was a little too bad in the printers of a Cambridge Bible, published some years back, that such a line should appear as ‘I will never forgive thy precepts.’ Here there was no writer nor transcriber concerned; the compositor made the blunder, and the press-reader passed it without detection; because as new editions of the Bible, unless newly annotated, are copied from the print of a previous edition, no manuscript is needed. A somewhat trifling error, though puzzling in its result, occurs in spacing the words: the last letter or syllable of one word is inadvertently placed at the beginning of the next, or else the first is placed at the end of the preceding word. When a lady is said, in a recent novel, to ‘rush down-stairs without stretched arms,’ we know what is meant; but the corrector ought not to have passed such a slip unnoticed. On one occasion—perhaps one among many—a foot-note is incorporated in the body of the page, throwing the whole sense of a paragraph into utter confusion. A printer will know how this may occur, in arranging his lines into pages; but what is the corrector about?

The most trying part perhaps of a compositor’s duty is to decipher the writing of some authors whose manuscripts have to be set up in type. No one can conceive, merely judging from the interchange of ordinary letters between relations and acquaintances, the large amount of badly written manuscript which reaches the printing-offices. And it is known that some of our most eminent authors, whose veritable words are regarded as more important than those of other men, are great sinners in this respect; they torment the compositor with specimens of the art of penmanship almost hopelessly unintelligible. Our readers will find this part of the subject—that is the misprints that are due wholly to the bad writing of the author or amanuensis, and not to carelessness shewn by the compositor or the corrector—fully illustrated by examples in the article ‘Wretched Writers’ in this Journal for March 14, 1874. The late Horace Greeley, the distinguished American, is pictured in that article as about the worst penman that ever disturbed the peace of a compositor.

A word or two about correctors and correcting. When the compositor has set up and arranged matter enough for say a sheet, a ‘proof’ is pulled at the hand-press, and the ‘first reader’ is employed to examine it closely for the detection of any technical errors; then, with the aid of a ‘reading-boy,’ he compares the paragraphs, one after another, with the author’s manuscript, corrects as he goes on by means of marginal marks on the proof, and queries any doubtful word or passage to which he wishes to draw the author’s attention. The compositor makes all the corrections suggested by this ‘first reader,’ and for common cheap kinds of printing this is enough; but for better work, a ‘second reader’ is employed to correct not merely the compositor but to advise even the author in regard to badly chosen words or badly arranged sentences—an intellectual revision, in fact, often performed by men who sometimes themselves afterwards rise to distinction as authors. The perplexities that beset the printer’s reader were pretty fully set forth thirteen years ago in the Journal; and we need say nothing more on that subject. What with the reading-boy, the first reader, and the second reader, we see that there are many possible responsibilities for misprints besides those due to the author, the copyist or amanuensis, and the compositor. An impartial distribution of blame is hence desirable so far as it can be done.