ldrich's
Crowding Memories, as to satisfaction of judgment.)

A half-tone portrait of the "prudish 'young-lady' proof-reader" (what a
lacerating taunt!) is printed in the Bret Harte Memorial Number of the
Overland (September, 1902).

The proof-readers have not dealt kindly with The Luck of Roaring Camp;
but the first of that ilk to mutilate the story was also the worst, to
wit, the aforesaid "prudish 'young-lady' proof-reader."

Good usage in typography was utterly unknown to this young
lady,--punctuation, capitalization, the use of the hyphen in dividing
and compounding words. In practice she did not--perhaps could
not--recognize any distinction between a cipher and a lower-case _o_.
As to spelling, one may find "etherial," "azalias," "tessallated."

Noah Brooks, in the Overland Memorial Number, says (p. 203),--

He [Bret Harte] collected some half-dozen stories and poems and
they were printed in a volume entitled "The Luck of Roaring Camp
and Other Sketches," (1870.)

There were no poems printed in that volume. It was published in Boston
by Fields, Osgood, & Co. Printed at the University Press at Cambridge,
then unquestionably the best book-printing house in the United States,
of course many of the typographical errors were weeded out. This volume
was reprinted in London by John Camden Hotten.

It is to be regretted that the University Press was not more
painstaking in the proof-reading, for the Overland typographical
perversions persist in some instances to the present day. The reader is
not misled by the lubbering punctuation of the sentence, "She was a
coarse, and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman." The usage in
such a construction is, "She was a coarse, and it is to be feared a
very sinful, woman." But note where the sense is affected:--

Cherokee Sal was sinking fast. Within an hour she had climbed, as
it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out
of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame forever.

Cherokee Sal could not possibly be the sin and shame of Roaring Camp
forever; hence the sense calls for a comma after "shame," in the
extract. It is gratifying to note that the comma is used in the Hotten
reprint.

Another egregious blunder which has persisted is the printing of the
word "past" for "passed," in the extract below.

Then he [Kentuck] walked up the gulch, past the cabin, still
whistling with demonstrative unconcern. At a large redwood tree