U PREFACE ́NFORTUNATELY for an American printer, there is no authority beyond appeal for the spelling, division, and compounding of words. Neither in America nor in Great Britain is there an institution, like the Académie Française or the Department of Public Instruction of France, which finally determines disputed questions in orthography. We have many dictionaries of the English language, but they do not fully agree with one another as to the spelling of some words. There are more than sixteen hundred variable spellings, as shown in the Appendix to this work, and each form of spelling has had the approval of good writers. There are other irregularities in literary and mechanical composition that are even more unfortunate. We have grammars that give us rules for the proper use of capital letters, italic, and the marks of punctuation, but these rules, good as far as they go, are not enough for the guidance of a compositor who has to set types for works much unlike as to form and style. Nor do our high schools thoroughly teach the correct expression of thought in writing. The pupil is taught to be precise in his pronunciation of Latin and Greek as well as of English; to give erroneous accent to a vowel, or improper emphasis to a syllable, stamps him as a vulgar perverter of correct speech; but with too many pupils the practice of exactness ends with correctness of pronunciation. Amateurs in literary composition soon acquire the bad habit of writing carelessly; they spell strange names in two or more different ways; they form capital letters, and even the small lower-case letters, so obscurely that one word may be mistaken for another; they have no clearly defined system, or at least observe none, for the proper placing of capitals, italic, and the marks of punctuation. There is a general belief that the correction of these oversights is the duty of the printer, and the writer too often throws this duty largely on the compositor and the proof-reader. During the last fifty years there has been no marked improvement in the average writer's preparation of copy for the printer, but there have been steadily increasing exactions from book-buyers. The printing that passed a tolerant inspection in 1850 does not pass now. The reader insists on more attention to uniformity in mechanical details. He notices blemishes in the composition of types more quickly than lapses or oversights made by the author in written expression. Not every reader assumes to be a critic of style in literature, but the reader of to-day is more or less a critic of style in type-setting. As there is no book of generally accepted authority that lays down a full code of explicit rules for orderly printing, every printing-house that strives for consistency as well as accuracy has found it necessary to make its own code for its own work. The code (or style-card, as it is often called) is constantly needed in every house for the guidance of new compositors and the maintenance of uniformity. But the works done in different printing-houses are much unlike, and different rules have to be made for different kinds of books, newspapers, and trade catalogues. What is correct in one house may be incorrect in another, and rules have to be more or less flexible for special occasions. Yet there |