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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 3
[trade dispatches]
Typo has now entered on the second half of its third year, and we are glad to say that it has attained a firm position. Each month now brings a gratifying addition to our list of subscribers, and to our advertising connexion; and each new subscriber, we find, does what he can to enlist further support. We are pleased to find subscriptions coming in, with words of greeting and encouragement, from our brethren in the Australian colonies. Some send friendly suggestions, which will be carried into effect as increasing support enables us to do so. We have many improvements in view, which will not however, affect the size or style of our page. Our present issue is the largest that has yet appeared.
Writing on the subject of « rings » and « corners,), the Mataura Ensign says: « Most of the recent great corners have resulted in disaster to the speculators, as, for example, those in wheat and copper. That this should be so is a kind of poetical justice. For these rings are in no sense useful to the trade of the world. They are obstacles to commerce. A species of highway robbery under the forms of law, that brings disaster and suffering to thousands of innocent people. It is the object of rings to prevent production, to prevent distribution, and to produce famine. They throw thousands out of employment and compel millions to pay black mail for necessaries. That they end so often in the ruin of their promoters is therefore a kind of judgment of Providence which mankind as a whole may well rejoice in. »
The American correspondent of a contemporary states that the San Francisco Times refuses to accept complimentary tickets for any place of public amusement. This, we may add, has for many years been the practice of The Times in London. In the colonies, where nearly every paper has its « job department, » actors do not rely on an admission-ticket to secure notices of their pieces. They studiously avoid the job-printer who does not control a newspaper, and they generally display remarkable generalship in the distribution of their job-work among the daily papers.
The manner in which technical terms are abused in the daily papers is not surprising when it is considered that they are always produced under circumstances of pressure. But the lapses of the scientific press in this respect are notorious and altogether without excuse. In a late number of the Hospital, for example, tobacco is referred to as « the most harmless of stimulants. » Now tobacco is not a stimulant, and containing a potent nerve-poison, is anything but harmless. The term « homœopathic » is often abused in the sense of « infinitesimal » —but it is not generally known that the first thus to misapply it was Hahnemann himself—the man by whom it was coined!
An industrious calculator has been compiling the statistics and curiosities of the reports of the Parnell commission, with some comical results. His list concludes thus; « Mr Davitt has had piercing eyes thirty-nine times, and been lost in thought ten times. He has also stooped to pick up a pin. The Government has been referred to five hundred and sixty times as a leaky vessel. It has sunk with all hands on board seventy-six times. Once it fell through the air, pierced by the arrow 'forgery,' to be dashed against the breakers, and dig its own grave. It has also been a coach without a rudder, the horses gone over the precipice, and the foremast in tatters. »
The following, from the Toledo Blade, will show that the American law is pretty severe on delinquent newspaper subscribers.—A newspaper in Ohio recently brought suit against forty-three men who would not pay their subscriptions, and obtained judgement in each case for the amount of each claim. Of these, twenty-eight made affidavit that they owned no more than the law allowed, thus preventing attachment. Then under the decision of the Supreme Court, these twenty-eight delinquents were arrested for petty larceny, and bound over in the sum of $300 each. All but six gave bond and have since paid the publisher, with costs of suit, and the above six were sent to jail. The postal laws make it larceny to take and receive a paper from the mails and then refuse or neglect to pay for it.
Mr Carnegie, the millionaire ironmaster of Pittsburg, is well known as the author of Triumphant Democracy, a book in which the United States are represented as a labor paradise, and which was considered as affording such an argument in favor of high tariffs, that a New Zealand protection league paid for the insertion of the whole work in instalments as an advertisement in a leading daily paper. Mr Charles E. Wheeler, secretary of the Ohio Reform League, has been visiting Mr Carnegie's coke ovens near Scotdale, and found that the laborers tending the furnaces were Hungarian women. « They were clothed with a short kilt and a pair of boots, and, so far as the eye could judge, that was all. From waist up they were as naked as the cold truth. In all the habits of daily life, with men they are as men. » The philanthropic founder of free libraries in Scotland wrings his gains from the toil of female serfs. We have as yet no millionaire manufacturers employing « undraped » female laborers in this colony: but « triumphant democracy » is rapidly preparing the way for such a condition of things.
On the 12th April, a social evening was spent by the employés of Messrs Cassell & Co., limited, on the occasion of Mr Galpin's retirement from the office of managing director. The chair was occupied by the Right Hon. A. J. Mundella, m.p., who made an excellent speech. Referring to the « Penny Dreadful » literature, he said it was neither exciting nor interesting, but unformly vulgar and trashy. None except those of poor mind and bad education—none who had once enjoyed the exquisite privilege of reading the English classics as produced in Cassell's National Library—could find pleasure in reading it. Regarding the « National Library, » he said that the fact that such volumes could be published and sold at 4½d seemed to indicate that the rising generation would be better than the one which had preceded it. He was, he was proud to say, the possessor of more than a hundred and fifty volumes of the series. His first difficulty with them was to know where to put them so as to be most accessible. At last he decided to put them in his dressing-room, so that when he returned from the House of Commons he might read a page of pure English, and by it take the bad taste out of his mouth.
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