Printing trade is haunted by ‘inky ghouls’

A ghostly typesetter with an odd name once cast a long shadow over the Dolores (Colo.) Star, an obscure weekly newspaper. 

The same mysterious specter also haunted big city dailies, including The New York Times. 

For nearly a century (up until the 1970s) a spirit known as “Etaoin Shrdlu” – pronounced “Etta-juan Sherd-loo” – was everywhere – wafting about the newspaper composition departments with great frequency, casting curses on lines of “hot type” that spewed forth from the mechanical Linotype machines. 

The legend has been passed along by folks like Ellis Miller of Dolores. His uncle, the late Tommy Johnson, once owned the Star. Miller told his story to Rob Carrigan of the Colorado Community Media group. 

Miller said: “The first two vertical columns on the left side of the Linotype board contained the 12 lowercase letters of ‘e-t-a-o-i-n’ and ‘s-h-r-d-l-u,’ respectively.” Ottmar Mergenthaler, who invented the Linotype in Baltimore in 1886, arranged the keys based on the frequency of their use in the spelling of English words. 

When the Linotype operator hit the wrong key by mistake, Miller said, “it wasn’t easy to go back to make a correction. You had to finish the line before re-keying a new one.” 

“Because the bad line was going to be tossed back in the melting pot, the industry practice was to do a ‘run down,’ creating this nonsense phrase – etaoin shrdlu – to signify the error,” Miller said. 

“It was supposed to be easy to see a ‘run down’ by those putting the pages together”…but sometimes, “etaoin shrdlu” got into print, and some readers found great sport in collecting the gibberish. 

The Readex Microprint Corporation’s digital collection of American newspapers has detected some 2,416 instances where “etaoin shrdlu” appeared in print. One of the most amusing popped up in an advertisement for Doan’s Pills from a 1928 edition of the El Paso (Texas) Evening Post. 

“Doan’s Pills, a stimulant diuretic, increase the activity of the kidneys and thus aid in the elimination ofswtae…ETAOIN SHRDLU ETAOIN SHRDLU UU…of waste impurities.” 

Typesetters and proofreaders should just shake off any typographical glitches, miscues, goofs and bobbles that make it into print, advises Nicol Valentin, author of a recent online essay. 

“Don’t take it personally; heck, don’t even take blame for it. You didn’t do it – it was Titivillus, patron demon of medieval writers,” she said. 

He first reared his ugly head in the scriptoriums of the European monasteries around 1285, “causing the scribes to make mistakes.” Not only that, “Titivillus collected those mistakes in a sack and carried them to the devil himself,” Valentin said. “On judgment day they were read aloud as evidence of the monk’s carelessness.” 

“Hopefully, none of us secular writers will have to deal with that when our end comes,” she wrote.

It was hard work being a medieval scribe, noted historian Victoria Lord. “Scribes wrote in bitter cold and searing heat. They worked as long as the light was good enough to see by,” she said. Candles and the warmth of wood fires were not allowed anywhere near the scriptorium, for obvious reasons.

 

Most scribes were probably young teenagers, because excellent eyesight was vital to the task.

Much has been learned from their comments in the marginalia of their manuscripts. Here are two notations that Victoria Lord uncovered:

“Let me not be blamed for the script, for the ink is bad, the vellum defective and the day is dark.”

“A curse on thee, O pen.”