I entered on my duties in a blissful ignorance of the trials that awaited me. I did not know how to “put a head” on an article or a selected “reprint.” I know nothing of the hieroglyphics necessary to let the printer know the various kinds of typo in which my headings should be set up. I did not realize that the writer’s manuscript must be, in a sense, ground through the editor’s mill and go through a certain process before being put in the printer’s hands. I did know that something was to be done, but the extent of that something I did not know. Of the signs to be placed on manuscript to show whether the type used should be “brevier” or “minion” or “agate,” or those to designate “full-face caps” for my upper headings and “full-face lower case” for my lower headings, of a “display heading,” of “balancing the columns,” nor that the headings on a page should not be jammed up together or too far apart. I was in that condition of ignorance that the smallest part of a printer was justified in looking down on me with contempt. * * * * * N. B.--In the composing room a printer is a much larger-sized Indian than a mere writer. * * * * * You who read the instructive and entertaining columns of ghastliness, accident, and crime in your morning paper--you who are unfortunately or otherwise neither writers nor printers, you think you could easily write one of those staring sensational headings over the article which tell all about it before you read it and whet your appetite for reading it. But you might not. It is not so much the literary ability needed. It is the printer who stands in the way. It is the printer who must have just so many words for one kind of “head” and so many for another. You must get your sense, sensation, and information condensed into say twenty-four or twenty-six words for one part of the “head” and ten or twelve for another part, and these must neither run over nor run under these numbers. If they do and the spaces are uneven that issue of the paper would, in that printer’s estimation, be ruined. If you, the editor, do not “make up” your pages so that the columns “balance,” the paper, for him, would be a wreck. The foreman of the composing room values a newspaper for its typographical appearance. This is right. A paper, like a house, should look neat. Only the foreman need not forget that there is something in the articles besides types. The magnate of our composing room called all written matter “stuff.” “What are you going to do with this stuff?” he would remark, and he used to put such an inflection of contempt on that word “stuff” that it would have made any but an old tough writer sick to hear him. Poems literally perspiring with inspiration, beautiful descriptive articles reeking with soul and sentiment, lively humor, manuscript written and re-written so lovingly and carefully--children of many a brilliant brain--all with him was but “stuff”!