"Compositor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself shading his eyes from the light with his hand, an old trick of his compositor days, and still looked at her in the same ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... he arrived in October, 1723. He soon obtained work as a printer, but after a few months he was induced by Governor Keith to go to London, where, finding Keith's promises empty, he again worked as a compositor till he was brought back to Philadelphia by a merchant named Denman, who gave him a position in his business. On Denman's death he returned to his former trade, and shortly set up a printing house of his own from which he published "The Pennsylvania Gazette," to which he contributed ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... of a compositor who emigrated much about the same time. He writes to his former office-mates that he got immediate and constant employment at the rate of 7 pounds per week, and naturally thinks that there is no ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... priest, as the woman was a Roman Catholic to the last. Gerald was sitting up by the window, so changed that we should not have known him, except for the wonderful likeness to Felix that has come upon him. It seems that he had not only all the writing of that horrid paper to do, but all the compositor's work, or whatever you call it. The people put upon him when they saw how well he could do it, and he could not refuse because his mother needed comforts, and he durst not get thrown out of employment. He went on, first with aching back, then his legs got ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you are writing for the compositor. Every letter must be right. If you do a good piece of work it is altogether probable that your composition will get into one of ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... was a compositor—a tall, lank, hollow-eyed man with a bad cough. His mother was a woman of the people, angular and taciturn. Jonas himself was pale ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... but she had spotlessness of skin, and sons and daughters just resembling her, like cheaper editions of a precious quarto of a perished type. You discerned the imitation of the type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor. Mr. Cramborne Wathin was by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he sprang (behind a curtain of horror) from tradesmen. The Bench was in designation for him to wash out the stain, but his children suffered in large hands and feet, short legs, excess of bone, prominences misplaced. Their mother inspired ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... such expressions as "You are kindly requested to recommend a compositor." Undoubtedly the idea of kindness is attached to the recommendation not to the request and the sentence should be so framed as to ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... Correspondents took up the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering; while others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite a pretty rivalry among ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shrieking priests of Baal are a picture of many a one since, who has cried for help and had no reply. Let the cholera come a little nearer our shores. As I write these words I hear it is in Spain; it may be in London before this is printed. There may be in the printing-office some infidel compositor, but though he sneers at religion and those who believe the Bible, he cannot keep away from the pestilence as silently it steals along the street where he sleeps! The cholera would drive infidelity away ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... please, but long before. His language must come from him as music comes from the rapid touch of the great performer's fingers; as words come from the mouth of the indignant orator; as letters fly from the fingers of the trained compositor; as the syllables tinkled out by little bells form themselves to the ear of the telegraphist. A man who thinks much of his words as he writes them will generally leave behind him work that smells of oil. I speak here, of course, of prose; for in poetry we know what care is necessary, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... This is one of them. I have access to the offices of our daily papers. I have a friend or tool in each. When a special telegram, in the line of criminal intelligence, comes to one of these papers, I am in possession of its contents before it has reached the compositor's hands. This morning a 'special' arrived at the office of the Evening Bulletin. I have not with me a copy. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Print is responsible for a great deal. The other day a tender-hearted person read in a daily paper, that a stranger "arriving in Paris, did not even know where to go and die." How sad! But the compositor had only omitted the "n" from the last word of the sentence. So it wasn't so bad after all, though for the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... size. Rousseau tells a story of a painter's servant, who resolved to be the rival or the conqueror of his master. He abandoned his livery to live by his pencil; but instead of the Louvre, he stopped at a sign-post. Mere learning is only a compiler, and does with the pen what the compositor does with the type: each sets up a book with the hand. Stone-masons collected the dome of St Paul's, but Wren hung ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... in the same style and by the same hand as in the De duobus amantibus. Other capitals and paragraph-marks in red and blue alternately. Initial-strokes in yellow. At the bottom of fol. 29^a a line accidentally dropped by the compositor is supplied in manuscript by a contemporary hand, viz., "non te uolunt. Quidam uero potentes sunt! ac ex." Both the recto and the verso of the leaf have the full complement of 23 lines but there is a hiatus in the text. The copies in the Bibliotheque Nationale, ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... press." She, with "wifelike government," kept the money, and heartened me to write, and write I did but with awful sufferings and difficulty, and much destruction of sleep. I think the only person who suffered still more must have been the compositor. Had this packet not come in, and come in when it did, and had the Sine Qua Non not been peremptory and retentive, there are many chances to one I might never have plagued any printer with my bad hand and my endless corrections, and general ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... years of age. At that early period of life, he entered into the printing-office of the New England Galaxy, learning to set type, and, shortly, came to have charge of the making up of the paper. My father often said that the best school education one could get was at the compositor's stand. Edwin early began to write for the paper, and I remember, now, with what admiration an article of his on "Massachusetts" was read more than sixty years ago, and while he was yet a boy. The Galaxy was sold ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... I found poorly qualified for their business. Bradford had not been bred to it, and was very illiterate; and Keimer, tho' something of a scholar, was a mere compositor, knowing nothing of presswork. He had been one of the French prophets,[29] and could act their enthusiastic agitations. At this time he did not profess any particular religion, but something of all on occasion; was very ignorant of ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... employed by coiners and forgers. Women were on the watch to give the alarm by their screams if an officer appeared near the workshop. The press was immediately pushed into a closet behind the bed; the types were flung into the coalhole, and covered with cinders: the compositor disappeared through a trapdoor in the roof, and made off over the tiles of the neighbouring houses. In these dens were manufactured treasonable works of all classes and sizes, from halfpenny broadsides of doggrel verse up to massy quartos filled with Hebrew quotations. It was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... message of truth to man, would suffer it to lie at the mercy of a careless or a wicked copyist. Treasures so vast would not be left at the mercy of accidents so vile. Very little more than two hundred years ago, a London compositor, not wicked at all, but simply drunk, in printing Deuteronomy, left out the most critical of words; the seventh commandment he exhibited thus-'Thou shalt commit adultery;' in which form the sheet was struck off. And though in those days no practical mischief could ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... have gone out to get something. Or perhaps she is with the people, a compositor and his wife, who live on the floor below. They are very good to her. I'll go and find her. Accommodate yourself with a chair, signore." And he drew the best chair forward for me, and ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... religious imagination played a small part in our philosopher's life, and least of all was it active in these London days. His skepticism in fact became acute, and sought relief in public expression. As a compositor Franklin was engaged in setting up one of the many religious treatises then pouring out against the deists, and as the author's arguments seemed insufficient to the young reasoner, he wrote and printed ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... presently and found work "subbing" on a daily paper,'The Inquirer.' He was a fairly swift compositor. He could set ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of work done. Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries. He was still acquiring education, you see. Sometimes at ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 1: The word "typographer" is used to differentiate between the compositor and the printer, the latter being the one who ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... which degraded society more than it debased the sufferer. Thus, at Hobart Town, men, for mere faults, have been sentenced to exposure and the scourge, in the view of hundreds: the flagellator extinguished the last feeling of the man, and roused the temper of the demon. An old compositor, within a month of his freedom, was charged with some trifling breach of convict discipline, and though the father of grown up children, was ordered by a chief police magistrate, this cruel disgrace. He is dead—and his oppressor is dead! Such cases were not uncommon, but they are past, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... painfully each word. After a time the words become so impressed upon the lower nerve-centres that we may read on when our attention is directed to some other thing. Thus, often we read aloud and are unconscious of what we have read, precisely as the compositor habitually sets up pages of manuscript without the faintest idea of what it is all about. This law of habitual action applies not only to the lower nerve-centres in their healthy condition, but with equal force in disease. It is notorious that one of the great difficulties in the cure of epilepsy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Folio, some praising it as among the most correct, and others blaming it as one of the most incorrect editions of its time. The truth seems to be that it is of very varied excellence, differing from time to time according to the state of the MS. from which it was printed, the skill of the compositor, and the diligence of the corrector. There is the widest difference, for instance, between the text of the Two Gentlemen of Verona and that of ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... phenomenally successful political career. Politicians for the first time disturbed about the tariff, the bank, and internal improvements, had come to the parting of the ways; the old order of things had ended under John Quincy Adams—the new had just commenced under Andrew Jackson. But the young compositor needed no guide-post to direct his political footsteps. In 1834, he had established the New Yorker and those who read it became Whigs. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... special opposition to the Stamp Act. She afterward removed to Salem, Mass., and continued its publication for several years. Penelope Russell printed The Censor in Boston, Mass., in 1771. She set her own type, and was such a ready compositor as to set up her editorials without written copy, while working at her case. The most tragical and interesting events were thus recorded by her. The first paper published in America, living to a second issue, was ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... two or more letters upon its face instead of one. This, his Lordship rightly considered, would save labor, if only available combinations could be determined; since, using such types, it would frequently happen that the compositor would need to make but one movement for two or three or even four letters. The desired economy, however, was not secured. Subsequent attempts at combinations were made in England, but all proved abortive. In the office of the London "Times," castings of entire words—devised, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... boy to set up and insert the obnoxious article and Jack knew that his theory that a poor compositor had done ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... surmounted all my troubles and difficulties, I will tell, and were I not a Christian I should be proud to tell, what I have been engaged upon and accomplished during the last ten weeks. I have been working in the printing-office, as a common compositor, between ten and thirteen hours every day during that period; the result of this is that St Matthew's Gospel, printed from such a copy as I believe nothing was ever printed from before, has been brought out in the Manchu language; two rude Esthonian peasants, who ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Clemens and Gillis to go to San Francisco, which had long attracted them. They were great friends, these two, and presently were living together and working on the same paper, the "Morning Call," Clemens as a reporter and Gillis as a compositor. ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... possible, and he is right also in making an exception of such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... promising kind, which presented itself to me unsolicited about this time, I might have failed in procuring the employment which I sought. An ingenious self-taught mechanic—the late Mr. John Mackay Wilson of Berwick-on-Tweed—after making good his upward way from his original place at the compositor's frame, to the editorship of a provincial paper, started, in the beginning of 1835, a weekly periodical, consisting of "Border Tales," which, as he possessed the story-telling ability, met with considerable success. He did not live, however, to complete the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... squall of the Terror had passed over, Nicolas Sechard was obliged to look out for another jack-of-all-trades to be compositor, reader, and foreman in one; and an Abbe who declined the oath succeeded the Comte de Maucombe as soon as the First Consul restored public worship. The Abbe became a Bishop at the Restoration, and in after days the Count and the Abbe met and sat together on the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... masses? Notwithstanding the hard fact that the editorial work of many writers is done late at night, after protracted hours of labor in other fields; and notwithstanding that where a journalist is able to give his entire time to the business, he is often sole solicitor, clerk, compositor, pressman, collector, office boy, and editorial staff combined—despite all these disadvantages, the beneficent effect of the Negro press is felt all over the land. The dozens of able men and women who are engaged in this noble work, most of them doing so at a tremendous ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... numbers of letters and telegrams and written accounts of various things that have taken place in different parts of the world have been coming in to this building. When they come in the editor looks at them and sends them up to the chief compositor. The "compositors," up in the top rooms where the lights are shining, stand before large wooden trays or "cases," each of which is divided into a number of small squares, like boxes without lids. These boxes hold what are called the types. The types are little slips of metal, ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... it is nothing. But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed. The present writer's father, a compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from "Childe Harold" at the case. Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this writer's friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the attraction, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... let me introduce to you Brother Peachey Carnehan, thats him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time. Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the Backwoodsman when we thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first and see thats sure. ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... book-binders, and paper-makers. The printer, as he existed even in the days of the Estiennes, has become almost an abstraction. The employment of women in type-setting has struck this noble industry to the heart, and consummated its degradation. I have seen a female compositor—and she was one of the best—who did not know how to read, and was acquainted only with the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... in somewhat rapid succession during the early years of the White Hope's life. She was introduced by Steve, who, it seemed, had known her since she was a child. She was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a compositor on one of the morning papers, a little, mouselike thing, with tiny hands and feet, a soft voice, and eyes that took up far more than their fair share ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... are, about half a dozen of them: Moretus, Theophilus, Harpalus, Eratosthenes, Werner, and Piccolomini," answered Barbican as ready as a schoolboy reciting his lesson, and pointing them out on the map as quickly as a compositor distributing his type. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... clamouring for copy. Then there was no pause or slumber for him; his attention was concentrated on his varied and difficult subjects till the moment when he rushed with disordered garments to the printer's office. There, seated anywhere—on the corner of a table, at a compositor's frame, or before a foreman's bureau—he became completely absorbed in the colossal labour of reading and correcting his proofs. The first number of the Revue Parisienne appeared on July 25th, 1840; but it was ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... was a farmer, but Robert aspired to own a paper, and drifted into the office of the Hartford Courant. Robert Bonner determined to own a paper; he, therefore, set about it, working faithfully every day, and overtime, saving his money. He mastered his business, becoming an expert compositor. In 1844 he went to New York and obtained employment on the Mirror. He was intrusted with the oversight of the advertising department, and it was soon seen that he had a decidedly fine taste in the arrangement of this line, a feature which has undoubtedly had much to do with his wonderful success ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... to be paid for the copy-right. I understand that nothing was allowed by the booksellers on that account; and I remember his telling me, that a large portion of it having by mistake been written upon both sides of the paper, so as to be inconvenient for the compositor, it cost him twenty pounds to have it transcribed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... occasion offered she might be married to a villain or, possibly, to a fool. But this was a concession to morality, it formed no part of his main scheme. Honest and hearty was Charles's dislike, and the past spread itself out very clearly before him; hatred is a skilful compositor. As if they were heads in a note-book, he ran through all the incidents of the Schlegels' campaign: the attempt to compromise his brother, his mother's legacy, his father's marriage, the introduction of the furniture, the unpacking of the same. He had not yet heard of ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... Francisco early in 1860 and found work on the "Golden Era," at first as compositor and soon as writer. In May, 1864, he left the "Golden Era" and joined others in starting "The Californian." Two months later he was made editor of the new "Overland Monthly." The second number contained "The Luck of Roaring ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... was of great advantage to him in that he had learned to do something for which there was a demand. He could not earn much as a compositor, but his wants were simple and he could earn something. He soon secured a place on the Golden Era, and it became the doorway to his career. He was soon transferred to the ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... the same talent;—being to poetry what method is to logic. Besides these qualifications, poetical compositions requires that command of language which is the mere effect of practice. The poet is a compositor; words are his types; he must have them within reach, and in unlimited abundance. Hence the need of careful labour to the accomplished poet—not in order that his diction may attract, but that language may be subjected to him. He studies the art of composition as we might ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... been evident to every person present. In fact, it was only after he closed that the real business of the evening began." Then followed speeches and the introduction of resolutions by "Mr. Howell, a bricklayer ... Mr. Odgers, a shoemaker ... Mr. Mantz, a compositor ... Mr. Cremer, a joiner, who was bitter against Lord Palmerston ... Mr. Conolly, a mason...." and other labouring men, all asserting "that the success of free institutions in America was a political question of deep consequence in England and that they would not tolerate any interference unfavourable ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... complacer, (pres. complazco), to please. completamente, completely. completar, to complete. completo,-a, complete; por ——, completely. componer, (see poner), to compose, prepare, arrange; —se, to consist. composicion, f., composition; preparation; dish. compositor, m., composer. compota, f., stew. compra, f., purchase. comprador, m., buyer. comprar, to buy. comprender, to understand. compuesto,-a, arranged; p.p. of componer. compuso, past abs. of componer. comun, ordinary, common; standard. comunicacion, ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... the workers in this department of the industry are hand or machine compositors. Until about 30 years ago, before practical type-setting machines were invented, all type was set by hand. Today the hand compositor, except in very small shops, works only on jobs requiring special type and special arrangement, such as advertisements, title covers of books, letter ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... the use of italics is so important that in many cases the compositor is justified in ignoring markings for italic in his copy where they are too profuse. The author is often surprised and disappointed at the appearance of his proof when it comes back heavily italicized. Moreover the occurrence ...
— The Uses of Italic - A Primer of Information Regarding the Origin and Uses of Italic Letters • Frederick W. Hamilton
... they? "Afflavit Deus"—and they are gone! Hark! is not the same wind roaring still that shall sweep us down? and yonder stands the compositor at his types who shall put up a pretty paragraph some day to say how, "Yesterday, at his house in Grosvenor Square," or "At Botany Bay, universally regretted," died So-and-So. Into what profound moralities is the paragraph concerning ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... over France to get up free institutions for the young, on plans more or less reasonable or absurd, by men who had fed upon Rousseau's Emile and invented variations upon his system. On leaving school, Beranger was placed with a printer in the city, where he became a journeyman printer and compositor, which has occasioned his being often compared to Franklin,—a comparison of which he is not unworthy, in his love for the progress of the human race, and the piquant and ingenious turn he knew how to give to good sense. From this first employment as printer Beranger acquired ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... that Mr. Singer (in common with Wood, Bliss, Ellis, Headley, and all other biographers,) overlooked the misprint of ARAMANTHA for AMARANTHA, which the old compositor made, with one or two exceptions, wherever the word occurred. In giving a correct representation of the original title-page, I have been ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... walked off to watch a compositor picking up type out of a case. Horace, on the other hand, appeared to be deeply interested in Mr Barber's eloquent observations, and inquired quite artlessly, but with a twinkle in his eye,—"Is the pump near here? I was looking ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... Similar persons are advertised for by private individuals; but besides these, I find: Wanted a bullock-driver, a carter, a coachman, a shoeing smith, three butchers, a bottler, two bakers, innumerable boys, barmen, a compositor, several dressmakers in all departments, half a dozen drapers' assistants, four grooms, sixty navvies in one advertisement, millers, haymakers, woodcutters, spademen, needlewomen, quarrymen, etc., two wheelwrights, a verger at L120 a year, pick and ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Argus' penetration), I have discovered a dash that might be dispensed with. Pray don't trouble yourself with such useless courtesies. I can well trust your editor, when I don't use queer phrases which prove themselves wrong by creating a distrust in the sober compositor. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... see why I should be ticketed with her label, and as Edward Gibson was very much like Edward Gibbon, the immortal author of the Decline and Fall, I dropped the 's' and stuck in a 'b.' I am nothing but a compositor on the Sentinel, and Saturday afternoon, after the paper is out, is a holiday for me, unless there is any reporting to do, for I have to turn my ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... is furnished with a number of what are called Cases,[2-*] properly fitted up, which are placed before the Compositor. The Compositor then places the Manuscript[2-] before him, and taking a small iron frame, or measure, adapted to the purpose, fixes it by a screw to the width which the Page he is to set up is intended to be, and commences ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... first makes us in love with the tools we are to use, long before we have a thought upon what we shall use them. Perhaps the first desire of the born writer is to be a compositor. Out of the love of mere type quickly evolves a love of mere words for their own sake; but whether we shall make use of them as a historian, novelist, philosopher, or poet, is a secondary consideration, a mere afterthought. To ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... compositor setting type in the metal "stick" with the sliding end. The compositor showed Bobby how he could tell when the letters were right side up by feeling the nicks in the type, without the necessity of looking; how he used the leads to space between ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... the Bibliomania. If one single copy of a work happen to be printed in a more particular manner than another; and if the compositor (clever rogue) happen to have transposed or inverted a whole sentence or page; if a plate or two, no matter of what kind or how executed; go along with it, which is not to be found in the remaining copies; if the paper happen to be unique in point of size—whether MAXIMA or MINIMA—oh, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... immigrated to Canada a short time before the excitement arising out of the Gourlay persecution reached its height, and when he himself was barely twenty years of age. He was a printer by trade, and for some time after his arrival worked as a compositor in the office of The Upper Canada Gazette, published at York by the King's Printer, Dr. Robert Charles Horne. Finding that he possessed much intelligence and a fair education, his employer deputed him to report the debates in the Assembly during the sessions ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Examiner, and with about as much matter as is contained in two pages of the English journal. The type is delightfully large, and the spaces between the lines are really pleasant to look at; next to a Roman editor, the position of a Roman compositor must be one of the easiest berths in the newspaper-world. Things are taken very easily here, and the Giornale never appears till six o'clock at night, so that writers and printers can take their pleasure and be in bed betimes. There is no issue on Sundays and Feast-days, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... the word "courtiers" was a misprint for "countenances," arising from an anticipation, by foreglance of the compositor's eye, of the word "courtier" a few lines below. The written r is easily and often confounded with, the written n. The compositor read the first syllable court, and—his eye at the same time catching the word "courtier" lower down—he completed the word without reconsulting the copy. It is ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the proper shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me introduce you to Brother Peachey Carnehan, that's him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time—soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the 'Backwoodsman' when we thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first, and see that's sure. It will save you cutting into my talk. We'll take ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication—the Daily Mail. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page. The matter he printed was emotional; the news organisation had not as yet found its way back. I learned nothing ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... of his peregrinations, he came to reside in the city in which our story finds him. Here he had become a compositor in the office of a daily newspaper, and, happening to be introduced to the Misses Dunning, soon became a favourite with them, and a constant visitor at their house. Thus he became acquainted with their brother. Becoming disgusted with the ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... appeared destitute of every qualification necessary in their profession. Bradford had not been brought up to it, and was very illiterate. Keimer, though he understood a little of the business, was merely a compositor, and wholly incapable of working at press. He had been one of the French prophets, and knew how to imitate their supernatural agitations. At the time of our first acquaintance he professed no particular religion, but a little of all upon occasion. He was totally ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... continued the publication of the paper, as editor and proprietor, for a long time, and at last succeeded in gaining for his journal a firm foothold in the community. He labored early and late at the work that was before him—editor, compositor and pressman—often beset with discouragements, always feebly supported in his efforts, but still hopeful and plucky. He could hardly, in 1860, have dreamed that within twenty years, steam presses would be brought into the same village to follow in the wake of the clumsy ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... to the printing-office. At eight the bell rings for family worship: we assemble in the hall; sing, read, and pray. Breakfast. Afterwards, brother Carey goes to the translation, or reading proofs: brother Marshman to school, and the rest to the printing-office. Our compositor having left us, we do without: we print three half-sheets of 2000 each in a week; have five pressmen, one folder, and one binder. At twelve o'clock we take a luncheon; then most of us shave and bathe, read and sleep before dinner, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... there is also the monotype, another ingenious invention, which produces single letters and prepares them for casting. With two such machines you might suppose that the compositor would have little to do. Nevertheless, in spite of each of these labor-saving devices, there are always odd jobs to be done that cannot be performed by either of these agencies; there are short articles, the making up and designing of pages, advertisements, and a score of things ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... in grand capitals, Mr. Compositor)—Billington returned from Italy! My father, who remembered, I suspect, the beautiful woman more than the accomplished singer, determined to hear again her Mandane; and sorely against my will, I rather think to prevent the chance of my doing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... "Well, one day my compositor brought me a proof-slip of which nearly the whole was taken up with a gigantic display head. It was the first report of the battle of Pittsburgh Landing—afterward called Shiloh, you know, and it gave the number of killed and wounded as ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... to composing-room, from foundation stone to the turrets of that tall pile, everything being governed by the will and impulse of a single mind. Indeed, to such an extent is labor-saving carried in the Parisian printing office that the compositor may never have seen the journalist whose leaders he has spent half his life in setting up, for copy, proof and revise glide up or down as if by the agency only of magic, and the real actors ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... apprentice of the celebrated printers Didot, at whose office he was noticed by David Sechard, who took him to Angouleme and employed him in his own shop, where Cerizet performed triple duties of form-maker, compositor and proof-reader. Presently he betrayed his master, and by leaguing with the Cointet Brothers, rivals of David Sechard, he obtained possession of his property. [Lost Illusions.] Following this he was an actor in the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... attained the utmost development then supposed to be possible; and when such news came as that of the battle of Austerlitz, Trafalgar, or Waterloo, the edition was exhausted long before the demand was supplied. There was a compositor in the office of "The Times," named Thomas Martyn, who, as early as 1804, conceived the idea of applying Watt's improved steam-engine to a printing press. He showed his model to John Walter, who furnished him with money and room in which to continue ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... Banter, who previous to his arrest had put his foot through several "forms" which it was inadvisable to let fall into the hands of the police, encumbered the floor. Everything was intensely chaotic and intensely dirty, from the type cases and the other scanty belongings to the dormant compositor. Armitage understood nothing of printing and I very little, and there we stood in the midst of a disorganised printing-office whence all had fled save only the unsavoury youth on the couch. I looked at Armitage and Armitage looked at me, and such was the helpless ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... understand.—After a great deal of argument, the paper at last had a 'first reading,' & was the proceedings of the McBain meeting, signed by Child, Thompson and Stillwell; and was delivered to Mr. Bunce, to shew his compositor, who was in bed. Mr. Bunce insisted that some of the gentlemen should deliver the message which judge Stillwell seemed to be so anxious about. Here the three gentlemen were thrown into great confusion—eyed each other as though each supposed ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... the proceedings and debates in the British Parliament, published by the printers Hansard, the founder of the firm being Luke Hansard, a printer of Norwich, who came to London in 1770 as a compositor, and succeeded as proprietor of the business in which he was ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... press—that is, to substitute a machine for the skilled hands that set the type from which a book or magazine is printed. Inventors have worked at this problem, and a number have solved it in various ways. To one who has seen the slow work of hand typesetting as the compositor builds up a long column of metal piece by piece, letter by letter, picking up each character from its allotted space in the case and placing it in its proper order and position, and then realises that much of the printed matter he sees is so produced, the wonder is ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... who are for the most part far more meritorious persons than fifth-rate authors. It is true that Burke returned such disordered proofs that the printer usually found it least troublesome to set the whole afresh, and Miss Martineau tells a story of a Scotch compositor who fled from Edinburgh to avoid Carlyle's manuscript, and to his horror was presently confronted with a piece of the too familiar copy which made him cry, "Lord, have mercy! Have you got that ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... unbecoming conduct. The girls of the neighborhood soon discovered his insight into the human heart, and his skill in correspondence, and they employed the boy to write their love-letters for them. In 1706 Richardson was apprenticed to a London printer, served a diligent apprenticeship, and worked as a compositor until he rose, late in life, to be master of the Stationers' Company. He was fifty years of age before he showed symptoms of any higher ambition than that of printing correctly acts of Parliament and new editions of law-books. In 1739 the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... which the General gave a low utterance, as soon as Rebecca and her conqueror had quitted him, were so deep, that I am sure no compositor would venture to print them were they written down. They came from the General's heart; and a wonderful thing it is to think that the human heart is capable of generating such produce, and can throw out, as occasion demands, such a supply of lust and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... least. Perhaps in England people liked to know that a hundred yards of trenches had been taken at one place, and that three German attacks had failed at another; but when you were actually engaged (or had been or would soon again be) in taking part in those things, it seemed a waste of paper and compositor's time to record them. There was a column of letters also from indignant Britons, using violent language about the crimes and treachery of Germany. That also was uninteresting and far-fetched. Nothing that Germany ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... entered a printer's office at the age of thirteen. A printer's office is, in itself, a source of education, and Whitman soon began to write for the papers, finally going to New York City, where, for twelve years, he worked on Newspaper Row, as reporter or compositor, making friends with all sorts and conditions of men and entering heart and soul into the busy life of the great city. The people, the seething masses on the streets, had a compelling ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Italian, Angiolillo. The latter was an editor in his native land, and his bold utterances soon attracted the attention of the authorities. Persecution began, and Angiolillo fled from Italy to Spain, thence to France and Belgium, finally settling in England. While there he found employment as a compositor, and immediately became the friend of all his colleagues. One of the latter thus described Angiolillo: "His appearance suggested the journalist rather than the disciple of Guttenberg. His delicate hands, moreover, betrayed the fact that ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... in that wretched little printing-office the compositor had made "Brickell" out of Brackett, and as he was his own proof-reader, the mistake ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... that Byron had reference to Ludovico Sforza and others. The fact of the change is asserted of Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, though in not quite so short a period, grief and not fear being the cause. Ziemssen cites Landois' case of a compositor of thirty-four who was admitted to a hospital July 9th with symptoms of delirium tremens; until improvement began to set in (July 13th) he was continually tormented by terrifying pictures of the imagination. In the night preceding the day last mentioned the hair of the head and beard of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one who works his way up. He holds that the only way to start is as a printer's devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... was faster than most persons could have transcribed that quantity' (ib.). According to Hawkins (Life, p. 99), 'His practice was to shut himself up in a room assigned to him at St. John's Gate, to which he would not suffer any one to approach, except the compositor or Cave's boy for matter, which, as fast as he composed it, he tumbled ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... body, are such prosaic people, that they will make no allowance whatever for the least amplification of bald matter of fact. If the author dilates at all on his own feelings and impressions, they chuckle and sneer; and if he errs in the least—or the compositor for him—in his nautical details, they cry out that he is a know-nothing, a marine, a horse-jockey, a humbug. To please seamen, any book about their profession must be written precisely in the lucid and highly-imaginative style of a log-book—their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... friend, Deacon Bartlett. In 1818, Ephraim W. Allen, proprietor of the Newburyport Herald, accepted Lloyd, then thirteen years of age, as an apprentice and taught him the printer's trade. Here at once he found a vocation suited to his tastes and became a rapid and accurate compositor. The printing-office proved an excellent school for the young man, developing his literary taste and ambition. He was fond of reading, and delighted in poetry and fiction. Politics especially attracted him, and at the age of sixteen he wrote anonymous ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... cattle to perform service due to the landlord. The boy received a solid education at the Gymnasium, or public school of the town. At a proper age he was bound apprentice for five years to Breitkopf and Hartel, of Leipzig, as compositor and printer; but after serving for four and a quarter years, he was released from his engagement because of his exceptional skill, which ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... of tramp printer ... clever, but with all his ability in him unexpressed ... he was always down and out ... and drink! It verged on dipsomania. He never held a job long ... though he was a good compositor, he was always on the move from ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... who was extremely dissatisfied, scolded me frequently and threatened to make a mechanic of me. I didn't dare say how happy that would have made me. I should have liked nothing better than to become a turner or a compositor. But my father was much too proud ever to have permitted such a thing. Finally a public examination at school, which they had persuaded him to attend in order to appease him, brought matters to a climax. A dishonest teacher arranged in advance what ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... public land to "actual settlers." It got in the paper as "cattle stealers." A reporter tried to write that "the jury disagreed and were discharged," but the compositor set it up "the jury disappeared and were disgraced." The last words in a poorly written sentence, "Alone and isolated, man would become impotent and perish," were set up as ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... It lived and flourished; at least it paid its way, as one of the heroes of my story could tell. He was chief compositor, or whatever title may be given to the head-man of the mechanical part of a newspaper. He hardly confined himself to that department. Once or twice, unknown to the editor, when the manuscript had fallen short, he had filled up the vacant ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... in New York begin to join the men's union, and there have been a few women members in it ever since. But how few in proportion may be judged from the figures on September 30, 1911. Total membership 6,969, of whom 192 were women. I believe this to be typical of the position of the woman compositor ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... on many pages of the book, and at odd times set some type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... came in characters bold as John Hancock's, and in chirography as small and neat as the writing of Charlotte Bronte, whose manuscript the compositor is said to have deciphered with the aid of a magnifying glass; and between these extremes were a dozen or more styles as varied and marked as one could wish. The purport of these messages, which were written rather quickly, and without ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... slowly back towards the farm, and again the gods were kind to them; for they forgot how short their time was, how quickly such moments fly. Much that they had to say to each other may not be expressed on paper, neither can any compositor ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Compositor to the Corrector of the Press "there is no heading for the copy for this chapter. What ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... illegibility or ambiguity of the author's original manuscript. Such flaws were perpetuated and multiplied with each successive transcript, and when the manuscript copy came into the printer's hands, the errors of the compositor—confusion of words sounding alike, of words looking alike, unconscious substitution of synonyms, mere manual slips, and the like—were added to those already existing. The absence of any uniform spelling, and carelessness in punctuation, which led to these being freely modified by the printer, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... who had written popular verses under the name of the "Boston Bard" while a compositor in the office of the Village Record, at West Chester, Pa., came to Philadelphia in 1821 and began a literary paper, which he called the Bee. Not more than two hundred subscribers were secured, and Coffin ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... send you an alteration in the Agnus Dei of my Gran Mass, which I beg you to hand to the compositor. The voice parts remain as before, but in the pauses I make the first subject come in again in the basses, which makes the movement more completely one whole. The compositor must work by this proof for the whole Agnus Dei, and only revert to the general score where ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... The compositor, in his haste, read an n for the r in the word parts, and the sentence, thus changed, radically in its significance, duly appeared in the ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... reglet[obs3], roman; running head, running title; scale, serif, shank, sheet work, shoulder, signature, slug, underlay. folio &c. (book) 593; copy, impression, pull, proof, revise; author's proof, galley proof, press proof; press revise. printer, compositor, reader; printer's devil copyholder. V. print; compose; put to press, go to press; pass through the press, see through the press; publish &c. 531; bring out; appear in print, rush into print; distribute, makeup, mortise, offset, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... separately; yet the five or six hundred essays form a whole, and a whole which has the interest of a novel. It must be remembered, too, that at that time no novel, giving a lively and powerful picture of the common life and manners of England, had appeared. Richardson was working as a compositor. Fielding was robbing birds' nests. Smollett was not yet born. The narrative, therefore, which connects together the Spectator's Essays, gave to our ancestors their first taste of an exquisite and untried pleasure. That narrative was indeed constructed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of any one of these classes is called a font, the average weight of which is about 800 pounds. Whereas our alphabet has 26 letters, the compositor must really use of letters, spaces, accent marks, and other characters in an English font 152 distinct types, and in each font there are 195,000 individual pieces. The largest number of letters in a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... reputation in Lancashire as a fighter. He stood 6 feet 1-1/2 inches in height, and weighed 15 stone 6 pounds. But, in spite of the eulogies of Pierce Egan—a low-caste Irishman, who was first a compositor, then a comedian, and afterwards a newspaper reporter (see Grantley Berkeley's 'My Life and Recollections', vol. i. pp. 107, 108)—Gregson had no science, and depended only on his strength, courage, and endurance. He was beaten by Gully at Six ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... in addition to the historical works for which he is chiefly known. As a lad, he helped his father, a printer by trade, in setting type.—Translator's Note.) At a certain hour of the day, a ray of sunlight would glint through the window of the gloomy workshop and light up the little compositor's case. Then his eight-legged neighbour would come down from her web and on the edge of the case take her share of the sunshine. The boy did not interfere with her; he welcomed the trusting visitor as a friend and as a pleasant diversion from ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... does not find time to read a line of us; but we do not for that reason escape being criticised, "shown up," and martyred. The list of errata again, committed by Lamb, was probably of a magnitude to alarm any possible compositor; and yet these errata will never be known to mankind. They are dead and buried. They have been cut off prematurely; and for any effect upon their generation, might as well never have existed. Then the returns, in a ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... never been surpassed in the editorial faculty, at the same time being apt as compositor, pressman, verse-maker, compiler and reporter; but as adviser, satirist and humorist he was perhaps at his best. His one and two line bits of comment and wisdom were models of pithiness, and few writers have equalled him in masterly skill in argument. He is spoken of by David Hume ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning—should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of Whistler's etchings, once appeared in print as saying that he had "no wish to understand Whistler's works." He wrote "understate," but the wretched compositor undid him. Whistler's response to the explanation was: "Yes, the mistake is indeed inexcusable, since not only I, but even the compositor, might have known that with Mr. Wedmore and his like it is always a question of understating ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... these new model houses lived some people of the name of Smith. Mr. Smith was a compositor, and Mrs. Smith, nee Samuels, was none other than that very little girl whom, together with her brother, who died, I had once treated for erysipelas resulting from vaccination. In a way I felt grateful to her, for that case was the beginning of my real success in life, and for ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... that there is a beast of burden, the worker, to whom, for the sum of a few shillings a day, he can entrust the printing of his books; but he hardly cares to know what a printing office is like. If the compositor suffers from lead-poisoning, and if the child who sees to the machine dies of anaemia, are there not other poor wretches to ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... reading, certainly makes sense. Pope read returns. The old copies have retires. I believe Shakspeare wrote "Rechides to chiding fortune." This puzzled the compositor, who gave the nearest common word ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... young journalist knew another home. For some months he set type on the Macon Daily Telegraph, going from there to New Orleans as private secretary of the editor of the Crescent Monthly. When the Crescent waned and disappeared from the journalistic sky, he returned to Georgia and became editor, compositor, pressman, mailing clerk, and entire force on ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... had manifestly happened was this. Goldsmith, turning over each page as written, had laid it on the top of the preceding page of MS. and forgotten to rearrange them when done. Thus the series of pages were reversed; and, so reversed, were set up in type by a matter-of-fact compositor. Mr. Dobell at once accepted this happy explanation; which—as Mr. Quiller Couch points out—has the advantage of being a 'blunder just so natural to Goldsmith as to be almost postulable.' One or two of the variations of Mr. Dobell's 'find'—variations, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of well-known persons which is printed in haste to satisfy the curiosity of the public, and of which the original manuscript is very fragile. First the text is copied; it is then set up by the compositor from the copy, which comes to the same thing as copying it again; this second copy is lastly, or ought to be, collated (in the proofs) with the first copy, or, better still, with the original, by some one who takes ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... my dear brethren— This repetition (not found in the later 4tos) is perhaps an error of the original compositor.] ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... to benefit his landlady. He had done her an uncommon good turn, queer as was the lodger thus introduced. His own apostleship to the sons of toil gave Mrs. Drabdump no twinges of perplexity. Tom Mortlake had been a compositor; and apostleship was obviously a profession better paid and of a higher social status. Tom Mortlake—the hero of a hundred strikes—set up in print on a poster, was unmistakably superior to Tom Mortlake setting up other men's names at a case. Still, the work was not all beer and skittles, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... containing some black lacquer-like substance, and a collection of quill pens twisted into stars. Sundry dirty scraps of paper, covered with almost undecipherable hieroglyphs, proved to be manuscript articles torn across the top by the compositor to check off the sheets as they were set up. He admired a few rather clever caricatures, sketched on bits of brown paper by somebody who evidently had tried to kill time by killing something else to keep ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... resembling a woodcut portraying the sparks from a blacksmith's hammer. Blots like mashed spiders, or crushed huckleberries, occasionally intervene, but the old veteran dashes them with sand, leaving a swearing compositor to scratch off the soil, and dig ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... one important department of the work, the newspapers had made no advance whatever. The newspapers of New York in the year 1885, and later, set up their type by the same method that Benjamin Franklin used to set up the type for The Pennsylvania Gazette. The compositor stood or sat at his "case," with his "copy" before him, and picked the type up letter by letter until he had filled and correctly spaced a line. Then he would set another line, and so on, all with his hands. After the job was completed, ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... language. Instead of a few characters representing sounds, like European alphabets, it consists of thousands of symbols, each representing an idea. The pupil must therefore spend years in learning to make, and know and read the mere signs of language. And in the modern necessities of printing,(228) the compositor must handle not less than 4,000 or 5,000 Chinese characters, besides the Japanese kana and other needful marks. The kana here mentioned were the result of a promising effort which was made to simplify the Chinese ...
— Japan • David Murray
... was leaving for a tour in Italy; 'as for me, I am off now to give a lesson to earn my bread.' The desire to visit England was once more uppermost in his mind, and when the Emperor, with a view to retaining him in Germany, appointed him Kammer-compositor at a salary of eight hundred gulden (about eighty pounds sterling), it must have occurred to many besides Mozart himself that such a 'beggarly dole' but poorly represented the value which his Majesty professed ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... compositor (Mr. J.P.S. Bicknell), who has been a noter of curious passages in his time, informs me that Bell was the first printer who confined the small letter "s" to its present shape, and rejected altogether the older form "s." [Transcriber's Note: "s." refers to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... know myself," said Platonov with artlessness. "You see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life. I have been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco—the cheap Silver Makhorka kind—have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have been a fisherman on the Black—on the Dubinin fisheries; I have loaded watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper, have ridden ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... John Faustus was Servant, or Journeyman, or Compositor, or what you please to call it, to Koster of Harlem, the first inventor of Printing; and having printed the Psalter, sold them at Paris as Manuscripts; because as such ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... applauding such stuff, and I wince when I see her praised in the papers. Oh! these papers! I have been making minute inquiries of late; and I find that the usual way in these towns is to let the young literary aspirant who has just joined the office, or the clever compositor who has been promoted to the sub-editor's room, try his hand first of all at reviewing books, and then turn him on to dramatic and musical criticism! Occasionally a reporter, who has been round the police courts to get notes ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... use of even a small dictionary will enable you to avoid mistakes. Every magazine has its own rules for punctuation and paragraphing, in accordance with which an accepted MS. is edited before it is given to the compositor; but that is no good reason why you should neglect to prepare your MS. properly. The general rules are few and easily understood, and they enable you to give your work definite form and arrangement, and make it much more easy to read. An editor who finds a MS. lacking ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... to fall to Franklin to set up the type. As was customary with him, he made himself thoroughly acquainted with the treatise of which he thus became the compositor. His mind was in such a state in reference to the claims of that Christianity which certainly did not commend the mode of life he was living, that it excited not only antagonistic but even angry emotions. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... taking the last word of one sentence and making it the first word of another, the intelligent compositor belittles a night fight for which I thought my command deserved no inconsiderable credit. I regret now that I did not take the time to make an elaborate report of the operations of my brigade, describing all the terrible situations in which it had been placed, and dwelling with special emphasis ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... books in the running brooks, sermons in stones," etc. "This is stark nonsense, and must be remedied. Who ever found a book in a rivulet or a sermon in a rock? It is clearly an error of a most ignorant or careless compositor, who has transposed the nouns. Read, 'stones in the running brooks and sermons in books.' Sense is vindicated. Stones are frequently found in brooks. David chose smooth pebbles from the brook, and sermons are quite frequently printed and sold in a book-form. By this restoration Shakespeare's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... who, influenced by a laudable desire to assist in the solution of the geographical problem, was of a very different turn of mind. He was brought up to the profession of a printer, and, as a compositor, had frequent opportunities of enriching his mind with various branches of knowledge, and in time became himself the author of several essays in prose and verse, by no means discreditable to his talents. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... The astute Mr. Alden had found himself at a loss to account for some of the exclusive items respecting the doings of Severac Bablon which latterly had been appearing in the Gleaner. By dint of judiciously oiling the tongue of a chatty compositor, he had learned that the unique copy was contributed by Mr. H. T. Sheard. Mr. Oppner had advised him to keep a close watch upon the movements of Mr. Antony Elschild. Although Alden found it hard to credit the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... minuteness of the rest of the script, and the latter covers every limit of the page in a devoted way. His letters were formed obscurely, though most fascinatingly, and he was almost frolicsome in his indifference to the comfort of the compositor. Still he had none of the frantic reconsiderations of Scott or Balzac. If he made a change in a word it was while it was fresh, and no one could obliterate what he had written with a more fearless blot of the finger, or one which ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... question mark is in the original. It is possibly a compositor's query which the author missed when correcting the proofs. The missing ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered— an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the result delightful, and (when you come to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to gain work was in a printing office, where he succeeded in getting a case, receiving his pay, according to the custom of the times, in orders on grocery and clothing stores. After this he was foreman and compositor in the office of a monthly publication, called the Farmers' Journal, where he continued to devote his spare time to reading and study. Subsequently he became a clerk in a grocery store at a salary of ninety-six dollars a year. With this small sum he not only supported ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... are themselves copied by casting the plaster in a liquid state upon the moveable types set up by the compositor. ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... while, Dad would write a blistering editorial about one or the other or both of them. Whenever he did, I would put my gun on, and so would Julio Kubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the third member of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure nobody got behind Dad's back. Nothing ever happened, though, and that always rather hurt me. Those two racketeers were in so tight they didn't need to care what the Times ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... Sir William Sleeman printed his Diary of a Journey through Oude privately at a press in the Residency. He had purchased a small press and type for the purpose of printing it at his own house, so that no one but himself and the compositor might see it. He intended, if he could find time, to give the history of the reigning family in a third volume, which was written, but has never been published. The title is: Diary of a Tour through Oude in December, 1849, and January and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... (Vol. ii., p.494.).—The word modern, instead of moderate, in my editions of Shakspeare, is a printer's error, which shall be corrected in the edition I am now publishing. To a person unfamiliar with printing, it might appear impossible that any compositor, with this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... taking up potatoes, the reverend gentleman could average seven shillings a day besides beer. But meantime our spiritual friend was poaching on the manors of the following people—of the chamber counsel, of the attorney, of the professional accountant, of the printer and compositor, of the notary public, of the scrivener, and sometimes, we fear, of the sheriff's officer in arranging for special bail. These very uncanonical services one might have fancied sufficient, with spinning and spelling, for filling up the temporal cares of any one man's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... a slanting disk in a flat ring, and the force goes in at the top of one atom, and out of the bottom of it into the top of the next, and so on, making a closed circuit. The two little spheres, each containing a triplet, are like fill-up paragraphs to a compositor—they seem to be kept standing and popped in where wanted. The sphere marked x is a proto-compound, the ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... go. I had made of myself a tolerable printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day, but somehow had missed the connection thus far. There was no berth open in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
