Black on White

Through the playfulness of the typesetter, a rhymed nonsense in this column last Monday was turned into gibberish. There is a difference between the two. Nonsense may conceal a few grains of gold under its ludicrous rags; gibberish has nothing to conceal. Nonsense is an idiot. Nonsense is Lewis Carroll, bits of Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift; gibberish is Hanfstaengl and Hitler.

The romping spirit of the linotypist therefore did me an injustice. But I do not blame him. The jumbled letters were an expression, no doubt, of his exasperation. At that he was considerate. I shudder to think what he might have done if he had given his feelings larger scope. And the proof-reader, feeling that the hard-worked linotypist deserved his bit of fun or revenge, maintained a strict hands-off policy.

Let the typesetter know that my sympathies are with him. Next to writing a column, the hardest thing in the world must be setting one. The temptation to put a little logic into the stuff is overwhelming, I am sure. I, for one, don’t know how he resists it. My own fingers sometimes itch for action when I peruse a column of Brisbane, let us say, or Walter Lippmann. If ever I turn to linotyping, I warn editors herewith never to entrust certain journalistic compositions to my tender mercies.

In general, the temptation of type under one’s fingers is irresistible. Even a typewriter is too much for me. Luckily its imprint is only ink and can be crossed out or destroyed. But the linotypist plays with solid, imperishable lead. The slightest whim of his imagination, the most offhand gesture of his racing fingers, is indelible. He knows well enough that the last thing a proofreader thinks of doing is to read proof, and that his own typographical fancies are therefore final. How he foregoes the pleasure of doing more jumbling and embellishing of the dull words that come endlessly to his machine is beyond me.

So, far from being offended by the typographical disasters, I am really grateful. With some effort I was able to find a few lines that had been set exactly as written. I am not unmindful of the subtle compliment.

I console myself that the more trustful of my constant readers have credited me with deep, mystic meanings as they tried to decipher the linotypist’s fancy-free composition. True, it didn’t make sense. “But,” they surely told themselves, “the fault is our own…. If Lyons wrote it, there must be something in it, even if we with our poor eyesight cannot detect it.”

Indeed, many a reader gets more out of his favorite authors than said authors ever put into their books. Many a slip of the pen or the linotypist’s fingers in James Joyce and Gertrude Stein have been held up with special awe as proof of their ineffable genius. New religions, not to mention religious factions, have arisen from a crack in the original parchment which was later mistakenly transcribed as a comma. Some of the