Item 18 - Note from R. W. Chapman to R. B. McKerrow

Clarendon Press, Oxford.—Comments on a passage about dictation.

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The Clarendon Press, Oxford
5 January 1927.

A priori, I think that if dictation was resorted to it was in the exceptional cases you suggest (bad light and the like). Is not composition so slow a process that to employ a regular reader must always be uneconomic (unless it were an unpaid apprentice)? Proofreading, now, is often done by use of a reader. Could some of the oddities, supposed to be due to dictation, be accounted for as corrections introduced at this stage? I wonder.

(I don’t credit the story of the man reading to a number of compositors!)

RWC

R. B. McKerrow, Esq.

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Typed, except initials and an underlining. At the head is the reference ‘Pkt. 428/RF’.