VERY few of the great mass of humanity know who makes the beautiful
public document, with its plain, black binding and wealth of statistics. Few stop to think that hidden away from the great work-a-day world, with eyelids heavy and red, and with finger-nails black with antimony, toiling on at his case hour after hour, the public printer, during the sessions of Congress, is setting up the thrilling chapters of the Congressional Record, and between times yanking the Washington press backward and forward, with his suspenders hanging down, as he prints this beautiful sea-side library of song.
We are too prone to read that which gives us pleasure without thought of the labor necessary to its creation. We glide gaily through the Congressional Record, pleased with its more attractive features, viz: its ayes and noes—little recking that Sterling P. Rounds, the public printer, stands in the subdued gaslight with his stick half full, trying to decipher the manuscript of some reticent representative, whose speech was yesterday delivered to the janitor as he polished the porcelain cuspidor of Congress.
This is a day and age of the world when men take that which comes to them, and do not stop to investigate the pain and toil it costs. They never inquire into the mystery of manufacture, or try to learn the details of its construction. Most of our libraries are replete with books which we have received at the hands of a generous government, and yet we treat those volumes with scorn and contumely. We jeer at the footsore bugologist who has chased the large, green worm from tree to tree, in order that we may be wise. We speak sneeringly of the man who stuffs the woodtick, and paints the gaudy wings of the squash-bug that we may know how often she orates.
Year after year the entomologist treads the same weary road with his bait-box tied to his waist, wooing to his laboratory the army-worm and the sheep-scab larvæ in order that we, poor particles on the surface of the great earth, may know how these minute creatures rise, flourish and decay.
Then the public printer throws in his case, rubs his finger and thumb over a lump of alum, takes a chew of tobacco, and puts in type these words of wisdom from the lips of gray-bearded savants, that knowledge may be scattered over the broad republic. Patiently he goes on with the click of type, anon in an absorbed way, while we, gay, thoughtless mortals, wear out the long summer day at a basket picnic, with deft fingers selecting the large red ant from our cold ham.
Thus these books are made which come to us wrapped in manilla and franked by the man we voted for last fall. Beautiful lithographs, illustrating the different stages of hog cholera, deck their pages. Rich oil paintings of gaudy tobacco worms chase each other from preface to errata. Magnificent chromos of the foot and mouth disease appeal to us from page after page, and statistics boil out between them, showing what per cent of invalid or convalescent animals was sent abroad, and what per cent was worked into oleomargarine and pressed corn beef.
And what becomes of all this wealth of information—this mammoth aggregation of costly knowledge?
Cast ruthlessly away by a trifling, shallow, frivolous and freckle-minded race!
It is no more than right that Sterling P. Rounds should know this. How it will gall his proud heart to know how his beautiful books, and his chatty and spicy Congressional Record are treated by a jeering, heartless throng! Do you suppose that I would perspire over doubtful copy night after night, and then tread a job printing press all the next day printing books at which the bloodless, soulless public sneered, and the broad-browed talent of a cruel generation spit upon? Not exactly.
I have a moderate amount of patience and self-control, but I am free to say right here before the world, that if I had been in Mr. Rounds' place, and had at great cost erected a scientific work upon "The Rise and Fall of Botts in America," and a flippant nation of scoffers had utilized that volume to press autumn leaves and scraggly ferns in, I would rise in my proud might and mash the forms with a mallet, I would jerk the lever of the Washington press into the middle of the effulgent hence. I would kick over my case, wipe the roller on the frescoed walls, and feed my statistics, to the hungry flames.
No publisher has ever been treated more shabbily; no compositor has, in the history of literature, been more rudely disregarded and derided.
Think of this, dear reader, when you look carelessly over the brief but wonderful career of the hop-louse, or with apparent ennui dawdle through the treatise on colic among silk-worms, and facial neuralgia among fowls.
This will not only please Mr. Rounds, the young and struggling compositor, but it will gratify and encourage all the friends of American progress and the lovers of learning throughout our whole land.
A REPRODUCTIVE COMET.
AN exchange remarks: "The present comet in the eastern sky, which can be distinctly seen by everyone at early morning, is certainly the most remarkable one of the modern comets. Professor Lewis Swift, director of the Warner observatory, Rochester, New York, states that the comet grazed the sun so closely as to cause great disturbance, so much so, that it has divided into no less than eight separate parts, all of which can be distinctly seen by a good telescope. There is only one other instance on record, where a comet has divided, that one being Biella's comet of 1846, which separated into two parts. Applications have been made to Mr. H. H. Warner, by parties who have noticed these cometary offshoots, claiming the $200 prize for each one of them. Whether the great comet will continue to produce a brood of smaller comets remains to be seen."
It is certainly to be hoped that it will not. If the comet is going to multiply and replenish the earth, the average inhabitant had better proceed in the direction of the tall timber.
It excites and rattles us a good deal now to look out for what comets we have on hand; but that is mild, compared with what we will experience if the heavens are to be filled every spring with new laid comets, and comets that haven't got their eyes open yet. Our astronomers are able to figure on the old parent comets, and they know when to look for them, too; but if twins are to burst upon our vision occasionally, and little bob-tail orphan comets are to float around through space, we will have to kind of get up and seek out another solar system, where we will be safe from this comet foundling asylum.
Instead of the calm sky of night, flooded with the glorious effulgence of the silvery moon, surrounded by the twinkling stars, the coming sky will be one grand Fourth of July exhibit of fireworks, with a thousand little disobedient comets coming from the four corners of heaven in search of the milky way.
Possibly science may be wrong. We have known science to make bad little breaks of that kind, and when it advertised a particular show to come off, it was delayed by a wreck on the main track, or something of that kind, so that people were disappointed. Let us hope that this is the case now, and that the comets now loafing around through space with their coat tails on fire will not become parents. It would be scandalous.
A LITTLE VAGUE.
A TALL, pleasant-looking gentleman, with quick, restless eyes, and the air of a man who had been in a newspaper office before, dropped into The Boomerang science department yesterday, and asked the pale, scholarly blossom, who sat writing an epic on the alarming prevalence of pip and its future as a national evil, if he could be permitted to read the Deseret News.
The scientist said certainly, and after a long and weary tussle got the Mormon placque out of the ruins.
"I used to be foreman on the Deseret News," said the gentleman with the penetrating eye; "I worked on the News two years, and had a case on the Tribune. I've been foreman of thirty-seven papers during my life, but my most unfortunate experience was on the Deseret News. I wanted the paper just now to see if they were still running an ad. that I had some trouble with when I was there.
"It was a contract we had with Dr. Balshazzer to advertise his Blue Eyed Forget-me Not Perfume, Dr. Balshazzer's Red Tar Worm Buster, and Dr. Balshazzer's Baled Brain Food and Tolurockandryeandcodliveroil. The Blue Eyed Forget-me Not Perfume was to go solid in long primer, following pure reading matter eod in daily and eowtf weekly. The Red Tar Worm Buster was to go in nonpareil leaded, 192I.T.thFth98weow3mo, and repeat; and the Baled Brain Food and Tolurock-andryecodliveroil was a six-inch electrotype to go in on third page, following pure original humorous matter, with six full head lines d&weod oct9tf, set in reading type similar to copy; these to be inserted between pure religious news, with no other advertising within four miles of the electro, or the reading notices.
"At the same time we were running old Monkeywrench's Kidney Scraper on the same kind of a contract. The business manager did not remember this when we took the contract, so that as soon as we began to run the two there was a collision between the Tolurockandryeandcodliver-oil and the Kidney Scraper right off. I spoke to the business manager about it, and he was puzzled. He didn't exactly know what it was best to do under the circumstances, and he hated to lose old Balshazzer's whole trade, for he wouldn't run any of his ads unless he would take them all according to his contract.
"We tried to get him to let us run the BlueEyed Forget-me Not Perfume, lapr9d&wly deod&wly 10:2t-eowtf; the Bed Tar Worm Buster, dol3 4t da22tf aprlo-ly dol3tf, and the Brain Food and Tolurockandryecodliveroil mchl8*ly jun4dtf&dangl8@gft>*&Sylds30tf&rsvpeod$, but he wouldn't do it.
"I displayed his ad. top of column adjoining humorous column with three line readers and astonishers without advertising marks or signs according to copy and instructions to foreman, all omissions or errors to be subject to fine and imprisonment. They were to go pdq $eoy*Octp&s* and they were to be double leaded and headed with italic caps. Still I said it had been some time since I saw the contract and I had been suffering with brain fever six months in jail and possibly my memory might be defective. I would go over it again and see if I was right.
"The electrophones were to be blown in the bottle and the readers were to be set in lower case slugs with guarantee of good faith and Rough on Rats would not die in the house. Use Pinkham's Sozodont for itching, freckles, bunions and croup. It saved my life. My good woman, why are you bilious with em quads in solid minion. Eureka Jumbo Baking Powder will not crack or fade in any climate sent on three months trial in leaded brevier quoins and all wool column rules warranted to cure rheumatism and army worms or money refunded. To be adjoining selected miscellany or fancy brass dashes marked eodsyld&w*!*?—" At this moment a dark browed man came in and told us that the young man was his charge and on his way to Mount Pleasant asylum for the insane and that we would have to excuse the intrusion. After subscribing for the paper and asking us if we had heard from Ohio, he went.
The scientist said afterward that he found it difficult to follow the young man in some of his statements and that he was just going to ask him to go over that again and say it slower, when the Mount Pleasant man came in and interrupted the flow of conversation.