The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1890-03-07
THE INTELLIGENT ooMPos1ToR.
That Much-Blamed Individual Finds q
Defender at Last.
DominicE o. Common in the Union.

Defender at Last
Doniniek o. Conner in the Union.
The intelligent compositor" is the man
who is supposed to make all the mistakes
which occur in the printing of newspaper.
Every newspaper Office has one. He is
the scapegoat Of the establishment. He is
damned alike by the publisher, editor, con-
tributor and reader. He does not appear to
have any friends; therefore it is safe to
blame him for any blunder that may be
made, and they all do it with wonderful
unanimity.
With all Of these gentlemen, save one, the
compositor has no relations. They are at
liberty to abuse him all they like. he does
not care; he knows them not. The one ex-
ception Is the proof-reader. With him the
compositor is at war-a never-ending, ire
presSlble conflict, which began with the
hrst proof-reader and will continue until the
last newspaper has gone to press.
But the conflict is one-sided. The proof
reader has it all his own way. He has some
how won the confidence of the public, and
he abuses the compositor TO his hearts con-
tent, and the public seems to believe him.
There are two sides to every question, how
ever, and because the compositor meekly
accepts all this blame 1t does not follow that
1t Is always his due.
well remember the night set up re-
view in which occurred the quotation from
Grays Elegy: 'Far from the madding
crowd" The proOf-reader marked it ''mad-
dening.n l went to see him about it. He
laughed at me in a superior sort of way and
said there was no such word as ''madding. "
tried to tell him about poetic license but
he knew as much about poetic license as he
did about Greek. Argument only made
him angry and he lofty asked me if l
wanted his situation. beat an ignominious
retreat and went out and bumped my head
against the wall several times to cool OF,
one of my fellow-compositors remarking
with hypocritical sympathy: You ought
to know better than to talk Choctaw to a
Chinaman"
An amusing blunder-for which the COM
posltor received the entire blame-hap-
pened on the Press several years ago, in an
editorial by Col. Forney. Like shaking a
red rag at a bulln is quotation which any
schoolboy ought to recognize at glance;
| yet because a tramp typo, unacquainted
with the colonel's flowing chirography,
| made ''bed-bugn out of ''red-rag" II escaped
the eagle eye of the proof-reader and ap-
peared so III the paper. What the colonel
| said when he read his article next morning
| has never been chronicled, but he dis
charged his entire force Of printers-but
| saved his proof-reader.
You write an article about Magistrate
South, and you see the proof. There it is
South, as plain as day. You pick up the
paper in the morning and find it Smith-and
damn the compositor. Or you chronicle the
death of a Bucks county statesman and
wake up in the morning and find that he
| was from Berks. Whose fault was that!
The compositor'ss By no means.
These are just few instances which recur
to memory at the moment. In each of
| them the compositor, while not blameless,
was much less at fault than the proof-reader.
| This is very often the case.
The proof-reader is rarely revised. In the
| hurry of preparing for the press time is
everything. Consequently, while the writer
| Of an article gets first proof" be seldom
! gets a ''revise." And right here is where
the proof-reader gets in his most deadly
work.
To err is human. Competitors are very
| human and err more or less. But proof
readers are not divine by a long WAYS. If
they were, the casus beli would, to great
extent, be removed; but machine" proof
reader-angels and ministers of grace, de-
| fend Sis answerable for many an eyre
| gious blunder for which the compositor is
| blamed.
| There are great many machine compost
tors. OF course; but the machine proof
reader is the dandy. l have run across him
| eo OtGen ShaI AaNe cOHle 10 Gne CONCLUSION
that his species will never become extinct,
and, realizing this, no " act on the "similta
similibus curantur" principle. In other
words, meet machine proof reading with
| machine composition, and, while the result
In the next days paper may not always be
gratifying to the editor and publisher, it
causes me less trouble.
In writing this my object is not to attack
the proof-reader, but to defend the compost
tor, who has never yet, at least to my
knowledge, had an open defender; and also
to remove the prevalent impression that he
is an unmitigated scouhdrel, who will do
nothing right that he can possibly do
| wrong.