A Book for All Readers: An Aid to the Collection, Use, and Preservation of Books and the Formation of Public and Private LibrariesSpofford, Ainsworth Rand
Science
A Book for All Readers: An Aid to the Collection, Use, and Preservation of Books and the Formation of Public and Private Libraries
Spofford, Ainsworth Rand
Books; Library science
returned upon your hands, with several glaring mistakes marked by the
reviser! Think, on the other hand, of the inward satisfaction experienced
when you have done your best, written and revised your own work, and
found it always passed as perfect. I have tried many persons by many
tests, and while I have found a great number who were industrious,
intelligent, zealous, conscientious, good-tempered, and expeditious, I
have found scarcely one who was always accurate. One of the rarest things
in a library is to find an assistant who has an unerring sense of the
French accents. This knowledge, to one expert in that language, even if
he does not speak it, should be as intuitive as the art of spelling
correctly, either in English or French. He should write the proper accent
over a letter just as infallibly as he writes the proper letters in a
word. But, strange to say, it is very common, even with good French
scholars (in the book-sense or literary sense of scholarship) to find
them putting the acute accent for the grave over a vowel, or the grave
instead of the acute, or omitting the circumflex accent entirely, and so
on.
Every one commits errors, but the wise man is he who learns by his
mistakes, and applies the remedy. The best remedy (as I said in the case
of memory in another chapter,) is to cultivate a habit of trained
attention in whatever we do. Yet many people (and I am afraid we must say
most people) go on through life, making the same blunders, and repeating
them. It appears as if the habit of inaccuracy were innate in the human
race, and only to be reformed by the utmost painstaking, and even with
the aid of that, only by a few. I have had to observe and correct such
numberless errors in the work of well-educated, adult, and otherwise
accomplished persons, as filled me with despair. Yet there is no more
doubt of the improvability of the average mind, however inaccurate at the
start, than of the power of the will to correct other bad habits into
which people unconsciously fall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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