Erik Dorn | Page 4

filled the place which, with the air of physical disorder
as if the workers were haphazardly improvising their activities,--gave
the room a vivid though seemingly impermanent life.
On the benches against a peeling wall sleepy-faced boys with
precocious eyes kept up a lazy hair-pulling, surreptitious wrestling bout.
They rose indifferently in response to furiously repeated bellows for
their assistance--a business of carrying typewritten bits of paper
between desks a few feet apart; or of sauntering with eleventh-hour
orders to the perspiring men in the composing room.
In the forward part of the shop a cluster of men stood about the desk of

an editor who in a disinterested voice sat issuing assignments for the
day, forecasting to his innumerable assistants the amount of space
needed for succeeding editions, the possible development in the local
scandals. His eye unconsciously watched the clock over his head, his
ear divided itself between a half-dozen conversations and a tireless
telephone. With his hands he kept fumbling an assortment of clippings,
memoranda, and copy.
Oldish young men and youngish old men gravitated about him, their
faces curiously identical. These were the irresponsible-eyed,
casual-mannered individuals, seemingly neither at work nor at play,
who were to visit the courts, the police, the wrecks, the criminals,
conventions, politicians, reformers, lovers, and haters, and bring back
the news of the city's day. A common almost racial sophistication
stamped their expression. They pawed over telephone books, argued
with indifferent, emotionless profanity among themselves on items of
amazing import; pounded nonchalantly upon typewriters, lolled with
their feet upon desks, their noses buried in the humorous columns of
the morning newspapers.
"Make-up" men and their assistants, everlastingly irritable as if the
victims of pernicious conspiracies, badgered for information that
seemed inevitably non-existent. They desired to know in what
mysterious manner one could get ten columns of type into a page that
held only seven and whether anyone thought the paper could go to
press at half-past ten when the bulk of the copy for the edition arrived
in the composing room at twenty minutes of eleven.
Proof-readers emerged from the bowels of somewhere waving smeared
bits of printed paper and triumphantly demanded explanation of
ambiguous passages.
Re-write men "helloed" indignantly into telephones, repeating with
sudden listlessness the pregnant details of the news pouring in; and
scribbling it down on sheets of paper ... "dead Grant park bullet
unknown 26 yrs silk stockings refinement mystery."
Idlers lounged and discussed loudly against the dusty windows hung

with torn grimy shades.
Copy-readers, concentrated under green eye-shades, sat isolated in a
tiny world of sharpened pencils, paste pots, shears, and emitted sudden
embittered oaths.
Editors from other departments, naïvely excited over items of vast
indifference to their nervous listeners, came and went.
An occasional printer, face and forearms smeared with ink, sauntered in
as if on a vacation, uttering some technical announcement and
precipitating a brief panic.
Toward the center of the room, seated at desks jammed against one
another in defiance of all convenience, telegraph editors, their hands
fumbling cables and despatches from twenty ends of the earth,
bellowed items of interest into the air--assassinations in China, probes,
quizzes, scandals, accusations in far-away places. They varied their
bellows with occasional shrieks of mysterious significance--usually a
misplaced paste pot, a borrowed shears, a vanished copy-boy.
These folk and a sprinkling of apparently unemployed and undisturbed
strangers spread themselves through the shop. Outside the opened
windows in the rear of the room, the elevated trains stuffed with men
and women roared into a station and squealed out again. In the streets
below, the traffic raised an ear-splitting medley of sound which nobody
heard.
Against this eternal and internal disorder, a strange pottering,
apparently formless and without beginning or end, was guiding the
latest confusions and intrigues of the human tangle into perfunctory
groups of words called stories. A curious ritual--the scene, spreading
through the four floors of the grimy building with a thousand men and
women shrieking, hammering, cursing, writing, squeezing and juggling
the monotonous convulsions of life into a scribble of words. Out of the
cacophonies of the place issued, sausage fashion, a half-million papers
daily, holding up from hour to hour to the city the blurred mirrors of
the newspaper columns alive with the almost humorous images of an

unending calamity.
"The press," Erik Dorn once remarked, "is a blind old cat yowling on a
treadmill."
It was a quarter to nine when Dorn arrived at his desk. He seated
himself with a complete unconsciousness of the scene. A litter of
correspondence, propaganda, telegrams, and contributions from
Constant Reader lay stuffed into the corners and pigeonholes of his
desk. He sat for a moment thinking of his wife. Call her up ... spend the
evening downtown ... some unusual evidence of affection ... the
vaudeville wouldn't be bad.