Abstract
This chapter relates not only how Caleb Stower emulated Philip Luckombe by appropriating Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683) and John Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar (1755), but also how he pursued his own editorial path by sympathetically adapting and modernising the content of these manuals for his own publication, The Printer’s Grammar (1808). Stower’s editorial contributions included observing the standardisation of hyphenation and spelling; devising a more efficient, enduring word-based cast-off method; supplying the first exemplar that visually captured editorial practice at work and improving on the methods for correcting manuscript copy and typeset page proofs. However, emerging from analyses completed in the previous chapters, as well as understanding how little editorial innovation occurred from this point, is a picture of the punctuated evolution of editorial style through active stasis.
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- 1.
See also Bigmore and Wyman (1884, 404).
- 2.
See also Public Record, The National Archives (the will of Caleb Stower , sergemaker); ‘Taunton St Mary’s—Marriages 1728–1812’, UK & Ireland Genealogy [online], <www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/SOM/Taunton/Tmar_Sq>, date accessed 25 February 2019.
- 3.
Note that no such chapter or article exists in Stower ’s manual; however, separate sections on the occupations of corrector and corrector are present.
- 4.
Note though that Stower removes Smith ’s initial ‘SECT. 1’ heading.
- 5.
Curiously, Luckombe (1770, 256) leaves Smith ’s heading ‘SCRATCHED FIGURES’ outside his incorporating ‘FIGURES’ heading.
- 6.
See also Pollack (2006, 17–18).
- 7.
Interestingly, Stower (1808b, 79) erroneously predicts the colon’s demise, stating it has ‘long since [been] considered unnecessary, and now but seldom used’.
- 8.
Compare with Smith ’s (1755, 87) voluble original: ‘’Tis true, that the expectation of a settled Punctuation is in vain, since no rules of prevailing authority have been yet established for that purpose; which is the reason that so many take the liberty of criticizing upon that head’. See also Bray (2000, 106).
- 9.
- 10.
Smith (1755, 155) writes: ‘To cast off Manuscript, is unpleasant and troublesome work, which requires great attention; and therefore ought not to be hurried, but be done with deliberation’.
- 11.
Stower (1808b, 138) does not acknowledge Smith as the author of the quoted material, but writes only: ‘As there are two methods of casting off copy, we shall conclude this article with the one laid down in former grammars’.
- 12.
- 13.
Luckombe (1770, 442–4) modernised Smith ’s instruction for his audience, without contributing additional material. In the second volume of Typographia, Johnson (1824, 216–20) adapts Stower ’s instruction on typographical marks, with an equally adapted piece of text with mark-up visually applied. Johnson contributes to editorial mark-up’s intertextual discourse by providing instruction on copy typeset in the wrong font, including the symbol ‘w.f.’ in the margin, a symbol that persists today. Fourteen years later , Timperley (1838, 54).
- 14.
Perhaps this is the reason why Smith neglected to reinstate the caret : its similarity to the circumflex.
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Hargrave, J. (2019). Nineteenth-Century Modernising Inheritance of Editorial Style: Caleb Stower’s The Printer’s Grammar . In: The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20275-0_7
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