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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 1
[miscellaneous paragraphs]
Keep your trade journals. They increase in interest as the years pass on. Keep them in good order, and bind them in annual volumes. Our own back volumes of the leading periodicals in the printing trade—in some cases complete from the commencement—are among the most highly-prized of our books.
« One Thousand Quaint Cuts, from Books of Other Days, » is the title of a curious book issued by Messrs Field & Tuer, London. There are really about 1150 miscellaneous blocks, chiefly from old spelling-books, nursery rhymes, chap-books, &c., which are very interesting. Some of the prettiest are by the Countess Spencer (1793) on p. 89; the most hideous are the modern imitations of old work (pp. 131-149.)
It looks like an anachronism (writes Ægles in the Australasian) to read at the top of a telegraph form of the Kingdom of Greece
EΛΛhnik0Σ ThΛeΓpaΦ0Σ
—and yet it is to the language of Homer that we are indebted for the word which symbolises one of the most wonderful of modern inventions of utility.
Reviewers are sometimes caught napping, and the Yankee story of the Western editor, who, on receiving a copy of Paradise Lost fresh from the press, wrote: « John Milton would do better to return to his legitimate newspaper sphere: in our opinion he is a very poor poet »—could almost be matched in actual fact. An American paper to hand last mail, noticing a fine-art edition of Dora, writes: « The elevation of Alfred Tennyson to the peerage has carried him far out of reach of his favorite muse, judging from the one of his creations now before us. Dora is possessed of a poverty of poetical thought unknown among his earlier writings, and is but a simple little story in blank verse, simply told. It is redeemed, however, by the hand of the artist, the skill of the engraver, and of the bookbinder. » (!) This is not bad, when we remember that the poet's « English Idylls » has been more than fifty years before the world, and that Dora is one of the best known and most admired of his minor poems. Not long since, the well-known and clever poem by Benjamin Franklin on « Paper, » appeared in an English trade organ, but without the writer's name. It was speedily copied by a transatlantic paper, which duly placed the name of its English contemporary at the foot of the verses. The editor of an important American paper was evidently unacquainted with Franklin's Essays.