Peculiarities of the Printed Page ...........

 

A light-hearted look at books and bindings,   proof-readers and printers........

and  a few other related subjects !

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   It was 1847 when William Henry Henslowe penned his curious volume ... and had it published by W.E. Painter.  There is no evidence that it ever achieved the status of best-seller !

After all, the title of this obscure volume was Beard Shaving, and the Common Use of the Razor, an Unnatural, Irrational, Unmanly, Ungodly and Fatal Fashion .

 

Even in my own personal library reposes a dusty tome :- Beards, An Omnium Gatherum,      in which the author devotes 300 pages to such  matters as  ‘Do beards grow more frequently on vegetarian than upon carnivorous chins?’ and ‘Are bearded men more addicted to eating horse flesh ?’ .

 

Taking pride of place on my library shelves  alongside  this  unusual investigation concerning the history  of whiskers is a rather odd work titled Smorgasbord and God by ‘Swithin’.   It was published in Melbourne, Australia,   in 1970. The contents of this proof-reader’s nightmare can be quickly assessed by a reference to a quotation from the back cover....

 

Consider the word TOILET BLOCK. Toilet refers to preparation, and block means obstruction, and the obstruction to man singular and race plural is the lie if Jesus Christ and the falseness of the truth delivered by the Church through the hand of God. Partake with me then, and gain the again, lie back, for TOILET BLOCK  decoded becomes “Li Top Duel, Dual Lock Jewel Key, a couple of eunuchs God and me.”

 

 I don’t think that hit the best-seller list either.

 

Whilst on the subject of ‘theology’ ( which seems to have inherited its fair share of odd characters) the year 1980 saw the publication of Scientific Proof of the Existence of God will Soon be Announced by the White House! The author, Da Free John is a well-known Indian guru. At the time of penning this article recent revelations to burst forth  from the White House  into the media of the world  were of a somewhat lower level..........

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 BIZARRE BINDINGS

 

Books have been printed with some unusual bindings...to say the least !

 

B.F. Hardwick of Bradford U.K. who flourished at the close of the 19th. century “used half pigskin, heavily tanned, which reduced to powder with handling.”  Another of his follies was to trim the margins. Having bound Wordsworth’s White Doe of Rylstone in  respectable material  he then used his guillotine to reduce the size of the book from quarto to octavo....thus taking a considerable amount of text with it !

Nevertheless, having remedied these slight   oversights , his firm continued in the book-binding business until 1974. ( Ash. p. 149)

 

Baxter’s Second Innings is one of those rousing cricketing yarn of the Boy’s Own variety.... including the inevitable  moral application on the last page.  Penned by Sir Henry Drummond, it was originally published in 1892 with a miniature cricket pad for the  front cover. Clever ! ( ( ( But my copy, alas, is not a first edition  and the plain, torn,  cardboard cover  probably indicates that it is  only worth 20 cents at a Salvation Army op-shop.)

 

According to The Literary Life and Other Curiosities   “the mistress of French novelist Eugene Sue ( 1804-1857) directed in her will that a set of his books be bound with her skin. This was done, and as recently as 1951 a special edition of Sue’s  Vignettes: les Mysteres de Paris, its cover made from skin taken from the woman’s shoulders, sold for twenty-nine dollars at Foyles, the famous London  book-store.” (p. 238)

 

Another  macabre  binding was that of “the skin of one George Cudmore who was executed for murder in England on March 25, 1830” ... the book being an edition of Milton’s works. ( ibid.)

 

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DELIGHTFUL DEDICATIONS

 

A book’s dedication page can often be a source of  amazement and/or amusement  to the reader.

 

For example, Pietro Aretino ( 1492-1556)  - a famous Italian poet – dedicated one of his books .... to his  monkey !

And Raymond Toole-Scott in his Bibliography of Books on the Circus (1964) gave us “In memory of my pussy-cat.”

J.B. Drought in his  Green Memory with Gun and Rod ( 1937) dedicated his volume  “To the best bag I ever made in Ireland -  my wife.”

 

There was a time when the dedication of a book brought the author a considerable amount of financial income. It became necessary,  to pay for the cost of having the book printed,  to find a wealthy  patron  and to assure him of  a highly praiseworthy  dedicatory page. 

Thomas Fuller, a Church of England clergyman, had this down to a fine art.  He devoted twelve pages  to dedications, “naming no less than fifty or sixty benefactors in his volume on Church History.”  And finding four blank sheets at the end of his book the Reverend Fuller “discovered a particular benefactoress to inscribe them to.”   ( D’Israeli.    p. 126)

 

 

When  Poet Laureate, John Dryden dedicated his work to King Charles II  he compared the monarch to Deity. Such extravagant introductory praise in the opening pages of one’s  book assured the writer of  pecuniary benefit !

 

A certain Thomas Jordan, we are told, “prefixed high-flown dedications to his books with blanks for the name, the blanks being separately and surreptitiously filled in by a hand press,  so there was a special dedicatee  for each copy.” ( Hendrickson.   page un-numbered)

 

  Laurence Sterne may have been poking fun at the insincerity of this practice when he dedicated his controversial novel, Tristam Shandy, to “be let or sold for fifty guineas!”

 

But the Silver Spoon award for the worst dedication must surely go to Philip Thickneese in his autobiography .  ( pub. 1788) It was addressed to his enemy..... “  It is to you whose conduct I am obliged ..... to defend my honour ....a base defamer, a vindictive libeller, and a scurrilous, indecent and vulgar scribbler, you are certainly the properest man existing...” ( Ash.  p. 154)

Suffice to say, this was an instance where the dedicatee did not  pay for the printing costs!!
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PROOF-READING PECULIARITIES !

 

Thy typographical error

is a slippery thing and sly,

you can hunt it ‘till you’re dizzy

but it somehow will get by;

‘till the job is off  the presses

it is strange how still it keeps,

it shrinks down into a corner

and it never stirs nor peeps.

 

That typographical error

too small for human eyes....

‘till the ink is on the paper

when it grows to mountain size;

the boss, he stares with horror,

 then he grabs his head and groans;

 the copy-reader drops his head

 upon his hands and moans....

 

The remainder of the issue

may be clean as clean can be

but the typographical error

is the only thing you see !

                                                                        ( Anon.) 

 

 

 

 

The proof-reader ( perhaps he should be  called a type-righter !) has an unenviable task.

 

A certain Carlo Guidi actually “died of shock”  when he translated a religious work into Latin, presented it to the Pope, and it was discovered that the Latin word sine had been printed as sin throughout the book. ( Hendrickson. p. 241)

           

But in all the history of the printed page it is difficult to find any proof-reader so fascinating a character  as Alexander Cruden. ( May 31, 1701 – Nov. 1, 1770)

 

He called himself Alexander ‘the Corrector’.....  not just because nothing, but nothing, escaped his eagle eye as he scanned the galley proofs, , but because he felt himself appointed by Deity to correct the morals of the people of London.  “ He habitually carried a sponge with which he effaced all inscriptions that were of an immoral tendency, according to his notions.” (Schaff.   p 576)   This may not have landed him in trouble,  but when he hit a citizen over the head with a shovel for swearing in public, he found himself in prison ..... for three weeks. And, we might add, for the third time!

 

Previously he had been so convinced that a certain Mrs. Pain, a widow, should marry him that he interrupted a church service to tell her so. “The congregation were quite sure the man was out of his mind” and they may well have been right.

 

On that occasion Cruden found himself chained to a bed in a Bethnal Green asylum....and after nine weeks he escaped “taking chain and bed-leg with him.”!( Oliver. P. 109)  He wrote a book about it, sued the proprietor of the asylum, defended himself in court, wrote an account of the trial and dedicated it to King George II. All of which came to nothing.

 

The story of him applying for a position as reader of French books to Lord Derby of Sussex

is but another of his unusual escapades worth telling. He got the job. Unfortunately he had failed to inform his employer of his inability to read French ...  “the first time he read to Lord Derby, Cruden followed the procedure he always followed in proof-reading  French books; he spelled out each word, letter by letter.”

  Reading the  rare biography  of Alexander Cruden by Edith Oliver , one of my  “collector’s items”, is  a delight. And yet there is a tinge of sadness also as one considers  the eccentricities, or was it lapses into madness, of this eighteenth century proof-reader. 

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PAGES IN PERIL !!

 

Prior to the days of  copiers and computers  , the only copy of a manuscript over which the writer had spent untold hours became a precious document.

 

One can hardly imagine the feelings of Thomas Carlyle(  of course, if you have ever had your computer crash after hours of work...you may be able to imagine it !)  when he sent his finished manuscript of   The French Revolution  to John Stuart Mill for  a final  assessment. And a maid, needing paper to light fire in the grill....... you guessed it !! Carlyle had to re-write the whole book

 

Dante, the Renaissance poet, was so grief-stricken at the death of his wife that he wrote a sonnet and had it placed in her coffin. But sometime later he decided that it was worth publishing...so the body was exhumed, the poem  retrieved, and Dante was happy. ( Hill          p. 128)

 

Adoniram Judson  was a missionary to Burma. For eleven long years he struggled  to translate the Bible into their language. And then war erupted  between Burma and Britain. On June 8th 1824  Judson was arrested as a spy and incarcerated in the rat-infested Death House at Ava. His wife, Ann, panic-stricken and not sure as to how to protect his  work  from being stolen or destroyed , buried the precious manuscript  in the garden of the mission house... and later bribed a prison guard to let her husband have a pillow.  In that   pillow was his translation of the Burmese Bible...the only copy in existence. After  nearly three years the war ended, Judson was released, the manuscript revised  and eventually the Burmese Bible was printed...  “ a book with its words so right in every shading that it still stands today as the best Burmese Bible in existence.” ( Bailey. p. 106)

 

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The world of the printed page abounds in curiosities. Which is probably to be expected. After all,  behind the pages  we  sometimes meet some  rather curious  people...... writers, book binders, ...and even printers......

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Curiosities of Literature  by  I. D’Israeli. 

Pub. By George Routledge & Sons, London. No date given . approx.  1850.  582pp.                                                                    ( Three   volumes in One,  Edition.)  Cloth.

 

The Literary Life and  Other Curiosities  by Robert Hendrickson.   Penguin Books, 1982;         406pp.  Paper.

 

Bizarre Books   by B. Ash and B. Lake.  Sphere Books Ltd.  1987. 180pp. Paper.

 

Actual Factuals ... by N. Hill.    Tyndale House.    I997 ... Paper.  295pp.

 

Beards.....   by R. Reynolds.  George Allen & Unwin. 1950. Cloth.  301pp.

 

Smorgasbord and God......  by Swithin.   Pub. By the author.  1970. Cloth. 252pp.

 

Adoniram  Judson ..... by F.C. Bailey.  Moody Press. 1955. Paper. 128pp.       

 

The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden  ...by Edith Oliver.  Faber and Faber, 1934  

                                                     Cloth. 242pp.

 

Religious Encyclopaedia .......edited by P. Schaff    Vol. 1.  Funk & Wagnalls.  1891.

                                                         Cloth.   640pp.  

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