Free Making a Point by David Crystal Page B

Judas-colour’d Hair,
    With Frowzy Pores, that taint the ambient Air.
    Printers beware, when dealing with satirical poets! Or, as we shall see later, novelists like Mark Twain.
    Keats also took a keen interest in the way his publisher dealt with his copy. In a letter of 27 February 1818 to John Taylor, he writes:
Your alteration strikes me as being a great improvement—the page looks much better. And now I will attend to the Punctuations you speak of—the comma should be at soberly , and in the other passage the comma should follow quiet . I am extremely indebted to you for this attention and also for your after admonitions.
    And Tennyson asked his publisher Edward Moxon (letter of 13 October 1832) to ‘send me every proof twice over. I should like the text to be as correct as possible.’
    Among the Wordsworthians is Thomas Gray, who in anundated letter in 1768 gives over eight pages of instructions to Foulis Press about how to print his poems, but adds: ‘please to observe, that I am entirely unversed in the doctrine of stops , whoever therefore shall deign to correct them, will do me a friendly office.’ And Byron writes to John Murray (26 August 1813) to ask: ‘Do you know any body who can stop—I mean point—commas , and so forth? for I am, I fear, a sad hand at your punctuation.’ And in a P.S. to a later letter (15 November 1813) he adds: ‘Do attend to the punctuation: I can’t, for I don’t know a comma – at least where to place one.’
    Printers obviously had the final responsibility of making a work look attractive, so that people would buy it. They knew that browsers in a bookshop – then as now – pick up a book and flick through the pages to see if it is for them. And among the many factors which influence the decision to buy are the layout of the text and the clarity of the writing, in both of which punctuation plays an important part. So it’s unsurprising that they paid especial attention to this aspect of the copy. It was not just a matter of adding the occasional comma. There were major ambiguities that had to be sorted, such as when an author failed to use quotation marks consistently, so that it was impossible to identify who was saying what in a conversation. Charlotte Brontë, in the persona of C Bell, writes (24 September 1847) to her publisher Smith, Elder & Co about the proofs of Jane Eyre :
I have to thank you for punctuating the sheets before sending them to me as I found the task very puzzling – and besides I consider your mode of punctuation a great deal mo[re] correct and rational than my own.
    The printers had to frequently correct her use of quotation marks and to insert colons, semicolons, and periods intowhat was a very lightly punctuated and difficult-to-read manuscript. She wasn’t atypical. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that it became routine for authors to submit clean copy on sheets of the same size, writing on just one side of the paper, and avoiding the heavy self-corrections that can make a manuscript illegible.
    The major printing manuals of the period all address the issue. John Smith’s Printer’s Grammar (1755) is mainly about the work of the compositor, and deals with the different fonts, letter sizes, differences between large and small capitals, and other technical matters. When he addresses the topic of pointing, he distinguishes two kinds of writer:
[some authors] point their Matter either very loosely or not at all: of which two evils, however, the last is the least; for in that case a Compositor has room left to point the Copy his own way; which, though it cannot be done without loss to him; yet it is not altogether of so much hinderance as being troubled with Copy which is pointed at random, and which stops the Compositor in the career of his business more than if not pointed at all.
    Writers, Smith finds, are typically lax:
most Authors expect the Printer to