78

THE YOUTH’S CABINET.

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be ascertained is the amount of margin
required inthe book. This being settled,
the printer looks out for some furniture,
of the right size, to place between the
pages and by the sides of the cross-bars.
The furniture used in printing, is made
of different lengths and widths, though,
of course, of about the same height,
which is pretty nearly the same as that
of the chase. Furniture is sometimes
made of wood, and sometimes of type-
metal. Care must be taken that each
piece of furniture is neither longer nor
shorter than the page. If it is longer,
the form cannot be properly locked up,
in which case it is said to bind. If it is
too short, the lines, either on one end or
the other of the page, not having any
other support than the furniture, will
fall down.

The next thing to be done is to secure
some long pieces of furniture, wider at
one end than at the other, to place on
the outside of the pages, next the chase,
so that wedges can be inserted at the
‘narrowest end, in order to lock up the
form. Then the cords are removed from
the pages; after which, wedges, called,
in the dialect of the printing art, guoins,
of the proper size, are procured, and the
form, if carefully imposed, is locked up
with ease.

It is not yet ready to be printed, how-
ever. The compositor may not have
read the manuscript correctly, or the
types in his case may, in some instances,
have got misplaced in the boxes.
sides, the author may have made some
sad blunders himself, which the compos-
itor felt bound to copy, but which the
proof-reader will not allow to pass.

It is astonishing, by the way, what awk-
ward work some authors—men too who

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have made themselves quite famous in
the literary world—always make, when
they come to put the commas, semico-
lons, and other similar marks, into their
manuscripts. It is extremely vexatious,
too, to the poor compositor, who, on ac-
count of such punctuation, has so often
to guess at what his author means. It
would be a great deal better, if some
manuscripts I have had sent to me for
publication in the Castner, had no sort
of marks of punctuation whatever ; for
where they are misplaced, as they sc
frequently are, they hinder a person
from guessing what the writer wishes to
enlighten the world about. I insist
upon it, that one who writes for the
press, and who either cannot or will not
use the points properly, had much better
leave them out altogether, after the
fashion of Timothy Dexter. Did you
ever hear the story about Dexter and
his famous book? I must tell it, I
think.

Timothy Dexter was an odd genius,
who dwelt in the old commonwealth of
Massachusetts, and who was always
blundering into some good fortune or
other. History informs us, that he took
it into his head, one day, to write a
book, and publish it. He did so. I
don’t know what topics he treated of;
but the peculiarity of the book consisted
in its utter absence, from beginning to
end, of everything in the shape of a mark
of punctuation. He added an appendix,
however, in which he gave three or four
pages of commas, semicolons, colons,
periods, exclamation points, hyphens,
and all other marks ever used in punctu-
ation, with a note to the reader, stating,
that as there was a great deal of differ-
ence of opinion among mankind, in rela-