Campus Tramp by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

of collapse.
    She coughed nervously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She coughed a second time and he looked up.
    “I’m here,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

CHAPTER FOUR
    “LINDA SHEPARD FROM CLEVELAND,” he said. “For a while I didn’t think you were going to come.”
    “I did.”
    “So I see.” He stood up and walked around the desk until he was standing just a few feet from her. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her eyes. His mouth was serious but his eyes were smiling.
    “Well,” he said, “what can you do besides look pretty?”
    She was flustered.
    “This afternoon you said you could spell. Can you still spell?”
    She nodded.
    He turned around and picked up a batch of sheets of paper over two feet long and four or five inches wide. He handed them to her without comment and she looked at them.
    “These are galleys,” he said. “Galley proofs.”
    She nodded, her eyes on the top galley. The print on the paper was set up like newsprint in a single column two inches wide.
    “Here’s how it goes,” he explained. “When a reporter types up a story it goes in my IN box. I check it, rewrite it when it stinks, correct the grammar and punctuation and toss it in the OUT box. Then it goes down to the printers.
    “The linotype operator gets it next,” he went on. “He punches keys and presses levers and it winds up on a batch of little pieces of lead called slugs. He puts the slugs in a tray, and when he’s got about sixteen inches of copy set he runs off a galley print, an impression of the type that he’s got set. The guy downtown gives me two sets of galleys. I use one when I make up the papers and I proofread the other and send it back to him.”
    “I see.”
    He smiled. “Do you? That’s impressive. It took me months to understand what the hell they do down there. Great business, newspapering.”
    He paused and sucked on the cigarette. He drew the smoke into his lungs and let the butt drop to the floor, squashing it absently with one foot. Then he looked at her again.
    “What I want you to do,” he said, “is proofread the copy. I’d do it myself except I’ve read all this copy a good ten times already and I wouldn’t be able to spot any typographical errors. Besides, at this hour my eyes don’t work any more and typos would go right by me anyway. Read the stuff slowly and carefully and make the corrections with a copy pencil. The outer office is lousy with copy pencils.”
    “How do I make the corrections?”
    He groaned. “I forgot—you don’t know proofreader’s marks. There’s a sheet outside on the bulletin board, plus a style sheet to show you what gets capitalized and what doesn’t. Better check them.”
    “All right,” she said. “How long will it take me?”
    He scratched his head. “Hard to say, but it shouldn’t take more than an hour tops, even if this is your first time at it. There’s about six or seven galleys there—you should be done by 1:30 or so.”
    “When will you be done?”
    He looked at her. “I won’t.”
    “Huh?”
    “I never sleep Thursday nights. It’s part of the job. As soon as I get the whole issue made up with the dummies down to the news and all the copy finished I can knock off, but by then it’s usually time to race down to Fairborn and pick up the engravings. And by then the first page proofs are ready at the printer’s and I have to read them. With one thing or another the rest of the morning gets shot to hell and the afternoon with it, and then I take the papers and haul them over to the caf so the idiots will have something to read with their dinner. I’ll get to sleep about seven or eight tomorrow evening.”
    “That’s impossible!”
    “Precisely. Great business, newspapering.”
    “But—”
    “Every editor does it,” he said. “I was managing editor under Phil Stag last year and he went through the same kind of hell. You can live through it.”
    “Can’t