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Spelling is the clothing of words, their outward visible sign, and even those who favor sweatpants in everyday life like to make a bella figura, as the Italians say—a good impression—in their prose. A misspelling undermines your authority. And an eye for the misspelled word can give you an edge in the workplace. It was a spelling mistake that gave me my first break at The New Yorker. Helen Stark had been right to predict that I would get restless in the editorial library. We took the magazine apart—figuratively, by summarizing its contents on index cards, and literally, with razor blades—and I wanted to help put it together. There was an informal training program, and Helen agreed to let me spend a few mornings a week on the nineteenth floor, helping to read foundry proofs. Dave Jackson was the head of foundry, and many proofreaders had started by working with him. He was tall and thin with a hectic red complexion and teeth that he could employ in a vicious grille. He looked like a less fortunate No?l Coward. He worked in a narrow room near the makeup department; earlier, his and his associate’s desks had been right in makeup. Foundry proofreading was the final reading before a piece went to print. Dave set me up at a desk with an easel-like board and showed me how to compare the Reader’s proof, marked with changes from the day before, line for line with the new version, to make sure that no mistakes had been introduced by the printer. When there were no changes and the copy didn’t reflow, you just had to make sure no lines had been dropped. You didn’t even have to read the piece. In fact, no one wanted your opinion. It was a strictly mechanical process: fold the old proof lengthwise, line up the column of type with the new proof, and move your pencil point down the page, eyeballing only the first few letters of each line. I always tried to read the whole line to try to catch a typo.
“I see you also caught that misspelling of idiosyncrasy,” Dave said, approvingly, implying that only a fortunate few knew that “idiosyncrasy” was spelled with an s at the end, not a c. Once he told me that V. S. Pritchett was a “marvellous” (with two New Yorker l’s) writer but a terrible speller. Pritchett had spelled “skeptical” with a c (“sceptical”), in the British fashion. Dave looked ferocious when he pronounced on these matters. He taught me that “over all” was two words as an adverb, as in “Over all, Dave gave me a good education.” Closed up, “overall” was an item of clothing worn by a car mechanic. Also, it was “what ever,” two words, as in “What ever happened to Baby Jane?” “Whatever” (one word) was a pronoun: “Whatever you do, don’t introduce a mistake.”
Dave’s office was full of shopping bags that were full of books. Fire inspectors had visited his apartment and deemed it a firetrap, so every day he ferried a shopping bag full of books from his apartment, on the Upper West Side, to the office. One day, he offered me a paperback copy of Wuthering Heights that he had bought on the street. “I already have a copy, but I couldn’t bear to leave it out there,” he said, with his vicious grin.
I made my first big catch as a foundry proofreader in one of the Christmas shopping columns. The writer was in the basement of Bloomingdale’s, shopping for food staples, and she had included in the list sacks of sugar and “flower.” I circled the interior we and brought it out to the margin and suggested u, putting a question mark next to it, as I had been taught. The question mark was necessary not because there was any doubt that the writer meant “flour” instead of “flower” but because I was inserting something that had not been on the Reader’s proof: that is, something that the OK’er, the proofreader of record, might have overlooked. If the typesetter made a mistake, you corrected it, no questions asked. But if a mistake had been carried over, the question mark on the foundry proof alerted the editor and the proofreader to something that might have slipped through. The question mark could be stricken and the change accepted, or both the question mark and the change crossed out and the change rejected. That question mark was a way of layering the sequence of changes, keeping a trail that showed the stage at which the change was made and whose idea it was. Without the question mark, a change could go straight to the printer without anyone in authority taking a second look. It was stupid to query something that betrayed your ignorance (and I did that, too), but it was occupational suicide to leave off the question mark and be responsible for a change that was not intended.