Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/156

Rh he begins thus. He glances cursorily over the exchange journals which have been accumulating since Saturday. He selects a column or so of paragraphs merry and tragical, ancedotes, wonders, extracts from books, and other excerpta which do not depend on dates for their interest—in one word, "Varieties," as they are technically called—besides the list of bankrupts, or other similar matters, which are published as a matter of course. These are given out to the overseer of the printing-office, for the letter will be all "distributed" in the coarse of the afternoon, and if the printers do nothing in the evening—"mike" they call it—they will be ready to take copy the first thing in the morning. During these two days, the editor transacts his private business if he can, visits his friends, if he has any, reads to keep himself au courant with the literature of the day, skims over the books which are sent to him for review, and, perhaps, he may write his notices of them. " On Wednesday the editor settles regularly to work, and so do the printers—he with die scissors and paste, and they with the composing stick." The editor wades through the newspapers which come to hand, column by column, collecting an olla podrida of news—a public meeting here, a monster gooseberry there—that is, accounts of them; foreign intelligence and local gossip; an earthquake is followed by a ball; an elopement by births, marriages, and deaths; the swell mob by ballooning, and so forth. Our editor now literally makes a hole in some of his contemporaries; for his sub-editor—thus he jocosely calls his scissors—seems ravenous, as if suffering from the abstinence of the last four days, and the printers cry "copy" incessantly. Already, indeed, begins an amusing struggle between the editor and the overseer, the results of which will be developed by-and-by. The editor knows, from unlucky experience, that the danger of getting into a difficulty at the last hour arises from having more matter than the paper will contain, not from having too little. The latter case very rarely occurs, notwithstanding the popular idea that editors are perpetually distressed for something to fill up. The overseer, on the other hand, knows that he must get a certain quantity of matter into type day by day, to get the paper out in proper time at the end of the week, and in a laudable, though very mistaken desire to push his work forward, tries to get a column or two beyond the proper quantity. The one demands an enormous or impossible quantity of copy for the time of the week, the other "starves" the printers, that he may keep the space as free as possible for the days when the latest news arrives. Like the Jews, the overseer asks a good deal more than he expects to get; and, like certain ladies who consider the art of shopping consists in offering less than they are asked, the editor doles out two columns of copy when three or four are demanded. This disagreement of the officials is influenced, too, by the difference of their ideas about newspaper making. The editor wishes to fashion the newspaper like a piece of cabinet-work, symmetrical in its proportions of light and heavy matter, the latest news, if any, being the most prominent, and the whole forming a regular design previously sketched in his mind's eye. The overseer, on me other find, cares only about having sufficient matter to fill the paper. The story runs, that Shammickshire ships are built in lengths, and cut off as they are wanted; in like manner the overseer would get up matter, and cut it into columns.