Tinker Aesop and His Little Lessons for the Age (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: occasion of my being called to assist at proof-reading while I reported for the Mercury. I prided myself in being very proficient in orthography, and was astonished at the monstrous spelling and misplacements of a column of print that was put into my hands to correct . " What blunder-headed fellows these compositors must be, to make so many mistakes !" 1 said, when I had looked carefully down the column, and put my corrections on the margin in black ink. Our old press reader, Matthew Page, came and took up the proof to examine and revise my correcting. "What a blunder-headed fellow you must be, Tom, to overlook so many mistakes," said he, as he returned the proof into my hands, with such a number of passed errors marked in red ink that I could scarcely believe my own eyes. At these evidences of my fallibility I now felt astonishment, and not at those of the poor compositors, and never before had the conceit of superior intelligence so taken out of me as by Matthew Page. We used to call him " The Fine Sieve," because he was supposed to remove, with his searching eye, all the little errata that escaped our coarser criticism, and so make the compositors' work fit for the press. Yet even he suffered a great many faults of one sort and the other to slip by him in every issue of our paper, and of these we were often told by some of our critical readers who had never been educated into tolerance by a trial of the difficulties of proof-reading. There were probably two or three hundred typographical errors detected in the Mercury every week, but fortunately there was never more than a small fraction of them observed by one pair of eyes. I remember going, on a fine Whit Sunday, to an agricultural village with one of our compositors, to visit an uncle of his who cultivated some land there. ..".