74

THE YOUTH’S CABINET.

 

ed, by means of a screw, that a part of
it can be moved upward or downward,
and thus adjusted according to the
length of the line desired. If the stick
was to be adjusted for the Canrnet, the
line would be quite a short one. The
compositor needs, also, a thin, smooth
piece of metal (he prefers brass or steel)
of the same height with the types, to
place perpendicularly in his stick, so that
the types will slide down easily by the
side of it. This he calls a rule, or when
he wants to be more definite—as there
are different kinds of rules—a composing-
rule. One end of the rule projects a
little beyond the outside of the stick, so
that, when he completes a line, he can
easily remove the rule. The types are
about four-fifths of an inch high.

When the compositor has adjusted his
stick, so that it is of the proper length,
and provided himself with a rule, he is
ready to commence setting the types ac-
cording to the manuscript. It is with
him a matter of great consequence,
whether the copy he has in hand is
written plainly on not. If it is easily
read, he does not care much what the
writer is driving at. The man with the
composing-stick seldom considers it a
part of his business to furnish brains for
an author. It is a common maxim in
printing-offices, “Follow the copy, if it
leads you out of the fourth-story win-
dow.” The worst of it is, however,
that the poor compositor too often finds
it utterly impossible to do any such
thing as that, not being able to tell, by
the author’s marks, what he means by
them. In such a case, the marks on
the manuscript, otherwise called words,
fo by the name of quail tracks. Some-
times the printer gets quite out of pa-

tience with his copy, and wishes the
man that wrote it was compelled to un-
dergo the punishment—he seldom asks
for a severer one—of reading some one
else’s manuscript, as badly written as
his own. With the printer, “good
copy” is copy that is easily read. The
author may write about anything under
the sun, or anything over it—about
science, art, theology, taste, politics—
he may tell stories, large or small—gos-
sip about the news of the day, or put to-
gether the different parts of a new Eng-
lish grammar—he may write sense or
nonsense, truth or untruth—he may take
the highest flights of which the human
reason is capable, or he may rave like an
inmate of the lunatic asylum—the print-
er does not trouble his head about it.
Only let him know what his author
means to say, and it will be his sole aim
to put the types into such a position
that they will say it.

Suppose, now, that the compositor
has some good copy in hand—it is some
of the manuscript for the Canine, and
as the editor of that periodical, if I am
correctly informed, -was once a printer
himself, and must know by painful ex-
perience how perplexing it is to set up
types from paper all covered with “quail
tracks,” he could hardly furnish any-
thing but good copy—suppose that he
has some good copy before him. He
proceeds to arrange the types in his
stick to correspond with what is writ-
ten. ‘The first thing he has to do, is to
set up the caption of the article—< A
Chapter on Printing.” ‘This caption
must be set in a type of a different size
from that in which the body of the ar-
ticle appears ; and he has to procure it,
consequently, from another case.