utor
to literature. There are certainly many books of high literary standing
that never would have attained their present form without the
intervention of type. It is well known that Carlyle rewrote his books in
proof, so that the printer, instead of attempting to correct his
galleys, reset them outright. Balzac went a step further, and largely
wrote his novels in proof, if such an expression may be allowed. He so
altered and expanded them that what went to the printing office as copy
for a novelette finally came out of it a full-sized novel. Even where
the changes are not so extensive, as in the proof-sheets of the Waverley
Novels preserved in the Cornell University Library, it is interesting to
trace the alterations which the author was prompted to make by the sight
of his paragraphs clothed in the startling distinctness of print. Nor is
this at all surprising when one considers how much better the eye can
take in the thought and style of a composition from the printed page
than it can even from typewriting. The advantage is so marked that some
publishers, before starting on an expensive literary venture, are
accustomed to have the copy set up on the linotype for the benefit of
their critics. If the work is accepted, the revisions are made on these
sheets, and then, finally, the work is sent back to the composing room
to receive the more elaborate typographic dress in which it is to
appear.

But to return to the advantages of type to the reader. Handwriting can
make distinctions, such as punctuation and paragraphing, but print can
greatly enforce them. The meaning of no written page leaps out to the
eye; but this is the regular experience of the reader with every
well-printed page. While printing can do nothing on a single page that
is beyond the power of a skillful penman, its ordinary resources are the
extraordinary ones of manuscript. It might not be physically impossible,
for instance, to duplicate with a pen a page of the Century Dictionary,
but it would be practically impossible, and, if the pen were our only
resource, we never should have such a marvel of condensation and
distinctness as that triumph of typography in the service of
scholarship.

In ordinary text, printing has grown away from the distinctions to the
eye that were in vogue two hundred years ago--a gain to art and perhaps
to legibility also, though contemporary critics like Franklin lamented
the change--but in reference books we have attained to