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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 5
[miscellaneous paragraphs]
« The Parnell Esclandre » is the heading of an article in a contemporary. Such a sentence suggests reflections as to the poverty and inefficiency of our English tongue.
There is no limit to the bad taste of advertisers if printers do not keep them in check. Fortunately the line is generally drawn when decency is offended; but not always. In one of our exchanges appears a ribald travesty of the Decalogue as the advertisement of a boot-shop. This is going a little too far.
A writ claiming £600 damages has been served upon the proprietors and printer of the Christchurch Press, for an alleged libel that appeared in that paper last October, referring to Frederick Thomas, keeper of an accommodation house, Wairau Valley, in connexion with the death by drowning of one George Lamb.
The audacity of the Yankee reporter approaches the sublime. The following anecdote is related on the authority of the Philadelphia Ledger: Several newspaper reporters were waiting in William O'Brien's room at the Hoffman House, New York, for the return of the Irish leaders. On the table was an envelope addressed to one of the members of Parliament. One of the reporters picked it up, and remarking that it was one of the privileges of a newspaper man to get the news in any way he could, opened the envelope, and taking out the letter, read it aloud.
Messrs Hoe and Co. have undertaken to build for the New York Herald the fastest newspaper press in the world. It is to produce 90,000 6-page papers an hour—1500 a minute, or 15 a second. It will produce 24,000 24-page papers an hour.
If there is a lower depth in journalism than that occupied by society papers, it is reached by the rank and file of the financial periodicals. New Zealanders have not forgotten the Financial Critic, and now the Financial News, a noted assailant of the colony's credit, has been exposed. According to a cable message in the Melbourne Telegraph, the criminal action for libel which Marks, the editor, brought against a woman, ended in his complete discomfiture. It was proved that he seduced and deserted her, and afterwards robbed her in New York in 1879; and her counsel narrated how Marks had bought a farm in the Transvaal in 1887 for £2000, which he sold the same day as a gold mine for £50,000.
The authorities of the Detroit Museum of Art have made that institution the laughingstock of the United States. In response to a requisition by certain women, whose immodesty must be equal to their prudery, they have attired the Venus de Medici, the Dying Gladiator, and other antique sculptures in the costume of American citizens of A.D. 1890! They might make this innovation a source of profit, besides making it of some practical value in illustrating the changes of fashion. If Venus and Apollo, Jove and Juno, were rented to enterprising tailors and dressmakers as blocks, the institution could realize a good income. Mars could be leased to a military tailor, and the group of the Laocoön, exhibiting three styles of gentlemen's and youth's costume, and decorated with price-tickets, would be an interesting novelty in an art-gallery.