Page:The practice of typography; correct composition; a treatise on spelling, abbreviations, the compounding and division of words, the proper use of figures and nummerals by De Vinne, Theodore Low, 1828-1914.djvu/156

142 supposed to be written for the convenience of the reader, and not to illustrate the author's scientific knowledge of the derivation and proper dissection of words derived from foreign languages. The reader is helped to a better understanding of the subject when the division of the word in the first line more clearly suggests the pronunciation (not the derivation) of the part following in the next line.

Efforts to help or educate the reader have been made often in a wrong direction. Before typography had been introduced, and for about twenty years after its invention, all books were written or printed as type-writing is now done, with a ragged outline at the right. This was unavoidable, for the early printers did not have spaces of different widths. There are improvers of typography in our own time who revive this old method, regardless of its raggedness, and to some extent of the correct division of words. In the chap-book style for the display of title-pages it is permissible to omit the hyphen in a divided word at the end of a full line, and there are other practitioners of this style who divide the word on any letter, regardless of the syllable, and require the reader to join the broken word without the suggestion made by the hyphen.

For more than three centuries printers of books appended at the foot of every page the first word or syllable of the next page. This catchword was supposed to be needed by the reader to make clear