Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 May 1893 — Writers. [ARTICLE]

Writers.

The worst class of authors, from the printer’s point of view, are those who alter, and add and transpose until a proof is a rivulet of type meandering through a meadow of apparently chaotic inky cobwebs. Carlyle, it is well knoMn, was a terror to compositors. The late Rev. J. G. Wood was another. W hen he sent back his sheets to the press little bits of paper were gummed along the edges, each containing two or three lines of writing. Burke was a third, for he returned his proofs in such a condition that sometimes the whole had to be set afresh. But Balzac was the terror of all terrors. With him it was not a question of resetting once; he would send fifty lines in manuscript, and, receiving proof after proof, would alter and add until he had evolved a story. His corrections probably cost more than those of any dozen, or even twenty, of his contemporaries. Bowser thinks he would like to be a physician. When a doctor treats, he says, it is the other fellow that puts up the money.—Boston TrauWipt.