to endure a long and tiresome apprenticeship and the tact to secure the most rapid advancement consistent with union rules at the hands of the powers above her.
Having looked over the field and decided that she is not only suited to the work, but deeply interested in the mechanical making of books and magazines, she must find her opening. This is not easy to secure, for printers are, above all other union men, the most clannish.
A sincere friendship or a ripening acquaintance with a working typesetter or proof-reader, man or woman, is worth a dozen letters of introduction to the man who owns the shop. The foreman of the composing-room or the superintendent of the shop, if it be a large establishment, is an autocrat before whom even the proprietor bows. No girl wants to enter a shop to be tolerated, rather than advanced. Therefore let her make friends with practical printers.
The most successful, the best-paid women proof-readers are those who started at the printing-case, that is, set type. There is nothing about the trade they do not know, and their knowledge of proof-reading is built on the firm foundation of typesetting and all its correlative work. Perhaps the girl in the smaller city has the better chance to start at the case, where, by the way, she draws the munificent salary of
