Journal Article

The Prince of Proofreaders

DE BRUIN, LOUISE

2022

Overview

'Faced with an increasing reliance on automatic spell-checkers or the attitude that, in the scheme of things, typographic errors don't much matter, those of us who are manically pernickety may hang our heads in despair.' [...]wrote Frank Key, the pseudonym of the English writer Paul Byrne (1959-2019), in a blog in February 2014 entitled 'The Art of Amateur Proofreading'. [...]in the time before the computer and the automatic spell-checkers, book-editing and proof-reading were also not necessarily faultless. Feipel also kept carbon copies of his own letters to them, correspondence with their publishers, and secondary correspondence with Lloyd Emerson Siberell (1905-1968), JCP's first bibliographer; Agnes de Lima (1887-1974), a friend of Llewelyn's wife Alyse Gregory, who wrote to him, when in 1940 Alyse was assembling letters from Llewelyn for a collection; and Edith Jardine, who, while typing them out, found Llewelyn's handwriting often as difficult to decipher as I did. The setting is Feipel's kitchen, which had the best lighting and writing-table for his proofreading activities, lacking the dated Victorian drapery of the rest of the house (312 11th St., Brooklyn, New York).

• Publisher: Powys Society,The Powys Society
• Subject: Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941) / Attitudes / Bibliographic literature / Blogs / British & Irish literature / Correspondence / Editing / English literature / Epistolography / Feipel, Louis N (1883-1968) / Handwriting / Powys, John Cowper (1872-1963) / Powys, Llewelyn / Powys, T F / Public libraries / Reading