The World of Words: editing, typography and print

Introduction

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Personal Story

1:37now at Whole Foods Market. Hello. At a key moment in my life, I made the life changing decision to not be a doctor. It wasn't a sudden decision. It was more of a zigzag spread over three years or so. This was devastating for my parents. Looking back on it, I can see that they held in their head a dream that their younger son would study hard and then go out into the world doing good. What could be better than having a son who could make people better? Doing things like mending legs. And if all

2:10was well, this son could nurse his parents through their latter years. For nearly three years, my parents blocked me from changing course. They wanted me to hang in there, getting through whatever difficulties I was having with anatomy, physiology and biochemistry. And then came the big question, if not medicine, then what? And I said, English. As I say that right now, I can see my father throwing his head back in a mix of amusement and disbelief. English, he said. English, that's just books about books. And I remember

2:46thinking, yeah, it is, but that's what's fun about it, isn't it? In fact, I think all I did was just nod blankly. The thought I've had since, and what I most certainly did not say, was, but that's what you did, English. And you've been doing it ever since. Books about books. To this day, I'm not sure why my father seemed to be opposing the very thing he had devoted his life to. And what do you know, though I've spent a lot of my life writing books, I've also spent a good deal of it doing just that, books about books.

Book Introduction

3:17And my guest today has written a book about books, or more accurately, what goes wrong with making books? The book is called Rogues, Widows and Orphans, Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books. And it's by Rebecca Lee, who joins me today. Welcome to the programme, Rebecca. Now, you've spent your life in books as well, haven't you? I have. I've spent about 25 years now working at Penguin, editing books. And in the last sort of few years, I've also branched out into writing books myself. Well, let's start with these words in your title, Rogues, Widows and Orphans. What do they mean?

3:53Widows and Orphans are typesetting terms. And one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is how the language of print can be quite brutal, almost quite upsetting. And so a widow is the last line of a paragraph stranded at the top of the next page. And an orphan is the first line of a paragraph left at the bottom of a page. And in the world of proofreaders, of which you're part, do you still use those words? Because they come from the time when you had metal and typesetting. But do people still use those? They do, yes. So you'll mark up widow, orphan, can we fix this? It's not ideal. You know, you want

4:28the pages that are beautiful and balanced for the reader. And so proofreaders are concerned to try and fix Widows and Orphans. But it's not always possible. But where we can, we do. So we've still got Rogue. What are they? What are Rogues? So Rogues is a nod to all the mischievous characters that you find popping up in the literary world. And one of the earliest is he's called a patron demon and his name is Titor Villis. They're made up. They don't actually exist. He doesn't exist, but he was a sort of necessary kind of psychological prop for scribes. So before books, we had manuscripts, we had scribes writing on vellum. And you can imagine

5:04that if you made a mistake on vellum, it was a nightmare. You couldn't get rid of it easily. And so the scribes came up with this kind of psychological prop for them to rely on. So when things went wrong, they could claim that it was a meddling devil. So it's a bit like gremlins in the Second World War, wasn't it? They called the things that went wrong in machines. Exactly. Exactly like that. And they used to write all sorts of things to explain the mistake, didn't they? They did graffiti on their own text in a way. They did. Sometimes, you know, they complain about being too hot, too cold, how bored they were.

5:38So manuscripts give us this lovely kind of insight into how they were feeling. And it generally wasn't a positive experience. And then are there other words and phrases we've borrowed from this world of, what should we call it, typography? Hmm. So, for example, something like mind your P's and Q's, which we use still. And that's because the lowercase P's and Q's sat next to each other in the sorting case. And the compositor would sometimes mix them up. So you have to be very careful about minding your P's and Q's. They look very similar to each other. And they had little tweezers to pull the letters out, didn't they?

6:09I think it was called a bodkin. Ah, right. I think that was the actual official name for it. Yes. So we've got things like, and this is my absolute favourite, out of sorts. So a sort is a piece of individual type. And printers were running their businesses on a shoestring. They're pretty mean. They would only buy the amount of type that they needed, the minimum they could get away with. So the poor compositors would be trying to typeset something and perhaps run out of a sort. So run out of the letter A or run out of the letter E. And they would be literally, and then probably emotionally as well, out of sorts.

6:42So that's where the idiom comes from. Yeah, that's where the idiom comes from. It's my favourite. And upper and lowercase is to do with print, isn't it? Yes, upper and lowercase. So the compositor had a type case in front of them. And on the top bit of it, it had the, what we now call uppercase letters. And below that, it had the lowercase letters. So calling something upper and lowercase literally comes from the compositor's sorting box. And any word with type in it, that must more or less come from that era, mustn't it? Exactly. Yeah. So we've got words like typecasting. So you're literally pouring hot metal into

7:15a mould to cast the type. So that's the metaphor that we say about actors. Exactly. Yeah. Has actually come from the world of print. It has. Yeah. And then you've got stereotypes as well. Again, so metal type was expensive. So printers would sometimes cast the mould of a set page for future reprints, print the page up and then break up the type to use elsewhere.

Language of Print

7:37You say in the book, the language of print is the language of error. That sounds like born of bitter experience of authors like me coming and handing over manuscripts and it's just error strewn. Isn't that right? I think in my job, so what I have now, Michael, is I've got a sort of typo recovery plan. Because one of the things you have to accept when you work in publishing is that things will go wrong. It's Titorvillis writ large. He continues to meddle. One example. One of my books went through, I don't know how many stages of proofreading,

8:07including me. And the word language, how ironic is this, came out as language. And it got through to the final, the book came out. And every time I look at it, I just feel weak and annoyed that sitting there right in the middle of one of my poems is the word language. Language. It would be language, wouldn't it? Yes. And obviously, we're working hard to eradicate error as much as we can. But the idea that you can have perfection, it's not human and it's not realistic. So I think you

8:37have to kind of make peace with the fact that there will always be mistakes. And I sort of have a, born of many years of long experience now, a kind of typo recovery plan when things go wrong with my books, which is, you know, you see a typo or someone points, or even worse, someone points out a typo to you in a book that you've been working on. And, you know, the first thing you have to do is kind of acknowledge it. Then you have to kind of apologise and fix it and try and understand what's gone wrong. And then I think you have to move on to the stage of putting it into perspective. And that's what I hope, it's one of the things

9:08I talk about in this book and my previous book is that not all typos are equal. So for example, spelling an author's name wrong on the jacket of the book, absolute nightmare. Has that happened? Not to me. I mean, I'm like, I'm fearful of saying this because Titor Vilas is listening and next week, who knows? Oscar Wilde, who you quote, is less forgiving. He says, a poet can survive everything but a misprint. I can just imagine that. In fact, yeah, I think I agree with him about that, actually. And you've got some examples in the book of some misprints, I think in the,

9:40isn't the King James Bible, you've got some, but anyway, you've got one, commit yourselves, commit yourselves to your owl husbands. What's that one? So, well, the Bible, there's various versions of the Bible that are known just by their typos. So, commit yourself to your owl husbands, that actually should have read, commit yourself to your own husbands. Yes, I did wonder. The most famous error in the Bible is what's known as the Wicked Bible, where the compositors managed to omit the word not from one of the Ten Commandments, thereby encouraging the

10:13readers to go and commit adultery. Thou shalt commit adultery. Thou shalt commit adultery. And people have taken that advice ever since. Well, you know, we've also got the Vinegar Bible. What's that? So, instead of the Parable of the Vineyard, we have the Parable of the Vinegar. And then we have a real Titor Vilas one, which is the Printer's Bible, where the line should read, Princes have persecuted me without cause, but it was changed to Printers have persecuted me without cause. And do we think it was Titor Vilas, or do we think it was mischievous human beings wondering

10:48whether they could get this through? I mean, Thou shalt commit adultery. It does rather sound like a practical joke. It does, doesn't it? There's probably no way of us actually knowing. So, we can put it down to Titor Vilas, or we can put it down to a bored printer's apprentice, or, you know, we can just say it was a mistake. And it even crops up, these kinds of mistakes, with Shakespeare's name. Now, I know there have been lots of jokes about Shakespeare's name and how you spell it. It's even appeared in a book, it's called No Bed for Bacon, and Shakespeare spends most of the book trying to remember how to spell his own name. It's one of the gags in the book.

11:20But you say, I haven't met this before, that the E in shake, in Shakespeare, that was to resolve a print problem. Possibly. I mean, it's like everything with Shakespeare, Michael, we don't know for sure. All we do know is that none of his six surviving signatures has an E between the K and the S in his name. And so, his name was a problem for printers and compositors. So, in the 16th century, the S would have been a long S.

11:51So, if you imagine... The one that looks a bit like an F without the stroke across the middle. Without the stroke across the middle. So, the S looked like a long F, and all the names were set in italics. So, that's like a squashed sense. And that meant that the K and the S, or the F, would overlap. The long S. The long S would overlap, and that would chip the type and break the metal. So, the compositors found a way around this, which was just to shove another E in between those two letters, just to give them a bit of breathing space. Yes, talking about that long S, in the first folio, you see the long S.

12:24So, you can imagine that silly little boys, and I was one of them, when he saw the first folio, quickly went to where the bee sucks, there suck I. I'll leave that to the listeners to figure out. Yes. Oh, here's my Shakespeare misprint story. Because I did Henry IV Part 1 for O Level. And there's a scene where some carriers, I guess we'd call them, I don't know, van drivers these days, maybe, they talk about some rich people that they hang out with. It says, burgomasters and great one-years, and all sorts of people, they've speculated

12:55about what that one-years word means, because they've never found it anywhere else. And some have said that it's a typo for manyers. So, but that particular kind of typo, where you leave out a letter. So, manyers is a word from that time, from Elizabethan times. So, great manyers, in other words, people with lots of dosh. And they think maybe the typographer left the M off. Do you buy into that one? Yes, definitely. I think that compositors had such a difficult job, you know, having to concentrate. Imagine if you're working with this hot metal type, and everything in your world is mirrored,

13:27because they had to do everything, or the type was backwards, so that when it was printed, it came out the right way round. Word by word, line by line, page by page, you can imagine how very, very easy it was to make a mistake. Like, also, people have made careers speculating on how all these errors come to be, like whole livelihoods of academia, about what these typos mean in Shakespeare. Books about books. Books about books.

Favourite Words

13:51And do you have any more favourites, favourite typos? A couple more of my favourites are one from George Orwell, one of my favourite authors. So, at the end of 1984, Winston Smith is sat in the Chestnut Tree Café when a bulletin comes on. And the line reads, a sort of electric drill ran through the café. Now, of course, it should have been an electric thrill. Oh, right. Electric drill kind of works. But just the idea of an electric drill running through the café always tickles me.

14:21Yes. And then I was chatting to a copy editor, a friend of mine, about typos, as we often do, and she said that one of her favourites had been one that read, get thee behind me, Stan, instead of get thee behind me, Satan, which, again, of course, shows Titovillis having a bit of a laugh. Yes. Well, maybe Titovillis is the devil and he didn't want to appear in print, did he? He'd want to be Stan instead. Now, children often ask me for my favourite word, and I'm pleased to see it in your book.

14:52It's palimpsest, and a palimpsest is one manuscript written on top of another. I like the sound of it and I like the idea of it. Let's explore palimpsests. What do you understand by a palimpsest? It's a great word. My understanding is that it comes from two Greek words, one of which is scrape and one of which is again, so scrape again. And a palimpsest is a piece of material that's been reused. So, for example, a parchment where one text has been scraped off or scrubbed away and another text has been written over it.

15:23And, of course, that's because originally writing materials were very scarce and expensive, so you wanted to make use of every scrap that you could possibly find. In fact, if you go to the British Library, into the Riblatt Gallery, you can see some of these manuscripts with people writing over the manuscript, but they had to scrape it, try and scrape the print off first. Exactly. But it still comes through, particularly on x-rays, doesn't it? Yes, it does. And that's why I say historians love palimpsests, because in some cases they're the only way that we know about a particular text. It's not because we have a copy of the text,

15:54but because we have fragments of it from the palimpsest, so this scraping through. So you've got a newer text over the top, but you can still see the shadow of what was there. So it's an amazing word. And what's your favourite word? My current favourite word is ways goose. Now, I say that, I've never actually ever heard anybody say this word, so I'm having to just go on how it's spelt, and it's spelt W-A-Y-Z and then goose at the end. So I think it's ways goose, and it's probably a Dutch word. And it's the name for a traditional printer's holiday.

16:26So the printers, on about the 24th of August, which is St Bartholomew's Day, and he's the patron of the printers, they would have a big holiday in the print shop. They would roast a goose, they would stay up drinking, they would have games. And it also marks the moment where printers started needing candles again, as the days drew in. So print shops were very concerned with light, and they were known as chapels, because the amount of light coming in reminded people of a chapel. And print shops were also heavily unionised,

16:57and that's where you get the idea of a chapel meeting as a union meeting as well. That survived in the print world. Yes. So another excuse for a festival, the ways goose, August 24th. I'm jotting it down even now. And you've got in the book some quite exotic terms from the world of typography, things like hell boxes. Tell us just a little bit about those as well. So while I was writing the book, one of the nicest things about it was that I discovered this fantastic dictionary of printing from the 1870s by a chap called John Southwood,

17:28and he was a printer and typographer. And it's just incredible, because you go through it and you realise what wonderfully specific language print has. And I sort of realised that a lot of the entries were falling into three categories. They were either quite brutal, or bizarre, or very beautiful. And now unsurprisingly, the printers, one of the things they were really concerned about was things that had gone wrong with their metal type. So there are lots of words for a problem with your type. So battered means that the type has been injured in some way.

18:00If it's choked, it's filled with ink or dirt. Oh, I remember my mum, with her typewriter, she was a touch typist, she had a little toothbrush, and she could un-choke, I'm just thinking about this, un-choke. Similar, I mean, because there were little metal letters that, you know, typewriter, some people, young people listen to this when we've not seen a typewriter. I started all my writing on a typewriter. So yes, oh right, choked, I didn't know that one. Yeah, and then we've got words like type could be described as bottle-arsed or bottle-net.

18:31So if you think about it, that's describing type that's wider at one end, mimicking a bottle, or narrower at one end. And again, it's that idea of it mimics the shape of a wine bottle, for example. So something everyone would have understood and recognised. So the devil appears in the printer's lexicon, doesn't he? He does. Yeah, just run through some of those references, the devil's references for us. So in the print shop, the youngest member of the printing staff, the apprentices, was always known as the printer's devil.

19:03And until this day, the sign of a print shop is a devil. And these young apprentices, you know, they looked like devils. They were covered in black ink. And they were a sort of, they'd become the kind of personification of Titavillus. You know, they were kind of mischievous. And they were the, you know, the most inexperienced members of the printing crew. So perhaps things went wrong more often than them. And they could be as young as 13, 14, couldn't they? Exactly, yeah. Yes, so it would have been quite small. Yes. So you've got your printer's devil. And then there's this brilliant, very evocative idea of what happened with broken type.

19:35So if there was a problem with your type, as we've talked about, if you got battered, injured type, it would be sent to hell or a place called the hell box. Well, you could melt it down. You could melt it down. And it would start again. Exactly. So it had a kind of like, you know, it got sent to the hell box. Then it was melted down and redeemed. And it could live to type another day because it could come back the next day as a different new piece of type, I guess. Now, the ways in which we can talk about writing is coming after talking. And you've got a lovely example of this with Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and Finnegan's Wake.

20:07Yes. So James Joyce, he had Samuel Beckett with him. And Joyce was dictating some of Finnegan's Wake to him. And in Finnegan's Wake, there was this phrase, come in, as if someone had knocked at the door, which in fact they had done. And Beckett had just simply written it down, assuming it was part of Joyce's dictation. Which you might do with Finnegan's Wake because it is not an extreme of consciousness. It is written in a kind of meaningful gobbledygook. It is. It's spoken language. And, you know, the words run together. The punctuation is very idiosyncratic.

20:39And Joyce's response to this is rather wonderful. He decided to just keep it in as part of the text. That's typical modernist, isn't it? Yes. They like the spontaneity of it. Yeah. Yes. And I was doing a little bit more like thinking about this as well, Michael. And Clarice Lispector, the South American novelist, two of her books begin just with a comma. You're straight into the heart of the story. This kind of very modernist stream of consciousness way of writing. And one of her books ends mid-sentence, which as a reader might be a bit frustrating, but that's where she chose to end it.

21:09Yes, yes. And modernists weren't always popular. I was in Australia in the late 80s and people were still talking about the famous Urn Malley story. And it's hard to figure out who has the last laugh in this one because it's a literary hoax story where they tried to pass over some modernist poems, didn't they? And some people believed it and then some people got angry. Just remind us of the story. It's a brilliant story. So there were two disgruntled Australian poets who really were fed up with modernist poetry, which they obviously thought was rubbish, basically.

21:46And so they came up with a plan to discredit the modernist poetry movement in Australia. And one afternoon they sat down. They were actually working for the army at that point. It was 1943. So they sat down one very boring still afternoon and they came up with 16 poems that they put together. They had a couple of books on their desks. One was a dictionary of quotations, I think, and one was just an ordinary dictionary. And this is my favourite thing about this whole story. The other book they had was a report on the drainage of mosquito breeding grounds, because that's what they were engaged with with the army.

22:17So they used these three books and they came up with 16 poems. And somehow the poems they came up with, I mean, they're very, you'll have seen them. They're very beautiful, quite credible, modernist sounding poems. So they produced these. They did things like spilt their tea on the paper, put everything out in the sun so that it began to look more aged. And they also came up with an author for the poems, a chap called Earn Malley, and a whole fictional backstory for him. They sent these poems to a modernist magazine called Angry Penguins.

22:49And the poor editor of Angry Penguins was completely taken in by this hoax. He believed he discovered this new modernist genius, Earn Malley, published the poems, and then it all unravelled and went horribly wrong. And they discovered it was a hoax. And yet some of the phrases, they worked. I mean, because after all, they were working to that principle of cut-ups, which was another modernist idea. But they were, in a way, almost inventing cut-up poetry, which, you know, we know phrases even grab from nowhere.

23:19They have meaning, don't they? Have you got some examples? Yeah. Well, the collection of poetry, I think, was called The Darkening Ecliptic, which is a great title. And then some of the verse reads things like, It was a night when the planets were wreathed in dying garlands. Great line. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, you'd be happy to write it. I would. Or, I have avoided your wide English eyes, but now I am whirled in their vortex. Well, that works. It does. I love it. So, in a way, the hoax becomes the real. I don't know. I can't quite figure it out.

23:50Yeah. It took on a life of its own. I suppose it's a kind of lesson that, you know, when you publish something, when you write something, you can't actually control what's going to happen to it. You have an idea about what you think will happen, but they could never have foreseen what would happen to their poems and how it would become this kind of infamous hoax. Yes. Now, what about writer's block? Do I suffer from writer's block? Perhaps I do. What are your favourite stories about writers trying to deal with it? It's interesting, isn't it? Because it feels like writers are the only sort of profession who are allowed to have this kind of fancy sounding phrase

24:23for when they just can't produce their product. So, you know, this idea of writer's block. And I guess, though, writers presumably have always suffered from some sort of writer's block, but it didn't sort of become a formal term until the mid 20th century. And there's an Austrian psychoanalyst called Edmund Bergler who made a study of writer's block. I bet he did. Yeah. Of course. And so it's interesting because he approached it from a sort of medical point of view, which presumably gave a lot of writers quite a lot of hope. Perhaps they were like, well, this is a medical problem. There presumably is a medical solution that will get rid of my block.

24:54But of course, it's not that simple. It's probably a psychological issue. And so it can't be treated by medical means. And so this is why you get so many sort of varied ways individual to each writer about how they deal with writer's block. So Ernest Hemingway, for example, well, two things that he did. He spent a lot of time sharpening a lot of pencils. Sometimes he would sharpen 20 or 30 pencils just to get the kind of mind whirring. But he also had, I think this is quite a neat trick, actually, and I should probably try it next time I'm writing, is he finished every day mid-sentence, which meant that the next morning when he got up,

25:29he had half a sentence to go back to that he could then finish off. So what if you don't remember what you were going to write for the next sentence? I think the idea is that he didn't have to start with, you know, begin a sentence, which perhaps felt psychologically heavy. He could say, well, I've got half a sentence here. All I've got to do is finish that sentence and then go on to the next one. Very good, Mr. Hemingway. Very good, Ernest. Very good. Yeah, very good. And John Steinbeck, I really like this. He advised that when you sit down to write, you should write as if you're writing to a letter to one specific person.

26:01So rather than just having to write to a faceless audience, it's to have one actual person in mind while you're writing. And then the final one I really like is Graham Green, who suffered from writer's block later in his career, but he kept a dream journal. That's what the Surrealists did as well. So he would have picked that up from them, maybe. There you go. So I guess, you know, the idea being that even if he couldn't come up with something original, he was actually, he was writing something down. And then we know from this dream journal that one of his dreams was about meeting T.S. Eliot at a poetry competition, which I love because it just sounds to me like the start of a brilliant short story.

26:37And you sort of think, well, all you have to do, Graham, was just take that dream and turn it into a story. If only it was that simple, Rebecca. That's what he would have said to me. Yes, yes. Well, you're listening to Word of Mouth. And as you may know, the programme is partnered with The Open University. And linguists from The Open University recorded an interview with me about the words and language I use. If you want to have a listen, go to the BBC Radio 4 word of mouth page and follow the links to The Open University. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype, like those $5 roses at a gas station or a secondhand piece of technology that breaks in the first 10 minutes?

27:16Marketers know that feeling. Marketers know that feeling. We optimise for the numbers that look great – impressions, reach and reacts – but when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that – bullspend. Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. You'll reach the right buyers, because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more.

27:48So cut the bullspend. Advertise on LinkedIn. The network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Save now at Whole Foods Market. It's the Summer Splash event, with great everyday prices on 365 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert.

28:19They have yellow sales signs on ready-to-cook beef or chicken kebabs, too. Level up with savoury marinades, spices, and rubs. And complete your cookout with a crowd-pleasing cherry pie and their balsamic chicken salad. Available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash savings now at Whole Foods Market.

AI and Language

28:42Now, Rebecca, you finished the book with a look at AI. And one theory about AI is it's going to do away with the likes of me. And probably me as well, Michael. But it's already producing a language of its own, isn't it? It certainly is. And it's very interesting. I think that AI is all about pattern recognition. But the other thing that's very good at pattern recognition are humans. So at the moment, we're able to spot just about AI. But the reason we're able to spot it is because it has various tells. Giveaways. Yeah, they flag to our sort of subconscious minds, I think, that hold on a minute, this

29:14may not have a human behind it. So we've got things like, it loves words like delve, intentional, pivotal, tapestry. And it loves sort of phrasing like, not just X, but Y. And it also seems to really like things like weather similes, patterns about light and dark. And it really likes sort of parallel and poetic high feeling. But despite this kind of overwrought emotion that AI often comes up with, you're kind of left with a feeling that there's nothing behind it. There's no kind of human agency.

29:46And I think that's what triggers a lot of these kind of uncertain feelings that we have when we read it. But I could just be a cliched writer to be using words like delve, intentional, pivotal, that you've said there, or tapestry, the rich tapestry of life, and all that. I could just be a cliched writer, which I sometimes ask. So you'd say, hello, Michael, we chose to hand it over some AI. And in actual fact, it was just me being cliched. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that what tells people is AI is a sort of agglomeration of things. It's the stacking up of all of these things, one on top of the other.

30:17So if you think about AI, it's kind of language that regresses to the mean a lot of the time, isn't it? It's kind of because it's built on anticipation. So using an aggregate loss of data, and it's just regressing to this kind of sloppy sort of mean. And so it has this real kind of like emotional flatness, which I think that humans still recognize as being slightly wrong. Well, I'll try not to be emotionally flat now. So Rebecca Lee, let me try a farewell. Maybe you'll want to edit it. But anyway, before that, I'll say thanks very much for coming on the program.

30:50And I'm going to try be seeing you. It's not very grammatical, actually, is it? So there's room for editing there. No, Michael, I would never edit you. Thank you for having me.

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