Copying

“ Beta: So, creativity is all the same wherever we come across it—in arts, technology, investigation, pure human communication . . . everywhere! The only things which change are the subject and the role of the outcome.
Teacher: So is creativity always the arrangement of known things in a new form?
Kappa: I also cannot believe how clear it is now!
Alpha: OK, you guys have come to the conclusion that copying is even more creative than producing the original work. ”

“ Where much copying has to be done it will be found an advantage, if at certain hours of the day the sun shines direct upon the studio, to remove all blinds, screens, or other obstructions, and so allow the rays to fall direct upon the print or drawing to be copied. ”

“ In copying, on the contrary, one part does not run away and leave you in the lurch, while you are intent upon another. You have only to attend to what is before you, and finish it carefully a bit at a time, and you are sure that the whole will come right. ”

“ It is a matter of some importance to know by what class of persons, chiefly, the business of copying books was practised; and it gives no little support to our confidence in the genuineness of existing manuscripts, to find that individuals of all ranks, influenced by very different motives, were accustomed to devote themselves to this employment. From the earliest times in which literature flourished, there were, in all the principal cities of Greece and its colonies, great numbers of professional scribes; that is to say, persons who gained their subsistence by copying books. ”

“ One man was constantly employed in copying out all our journals and scientific observations, etc., etc., on thin paper in a contracted form, as I wanted, by way of doubly assuring their preservation, to take a copy of them along with me. ”

“ Another fertile source of variation arises from errors in successive copies. At a time when men had no measures or other appliances to assist them in copying correctly, and were guided only by the eye, an implement would soon be made to assume a very different appearance. ”

“ V. It will be asked, How is imitation to be rendered healthy and vital? Unhappily, while it is easy to enumerate the signs of life, it is impossible to define or to communicate life; and while every intelligent writer on Art has insisted on the difference between the copying found in an advancing or recedent period, none have been able to communicate, in the slightest degree, the force of vitality to the copyist over whom they might have influence. ”

“ The copyists of the middle ages may be properly divided in two classes: the class that considered copying an irksome duty and that did its work mechanically and badly; the class that treated book-making as a purely artistic occupation, and gave the most time and care to ornamentation. The book-makers who made search for authentic copies, comparing the different texts of books and correcting their errors, did not appear until after the invention of printing. ”

“ A student, when he first copies a head, soon comes to a stand, or is at a loss to proceed from seeing nothing more in the face than there is in his copy. After a year or two’s practice he never knows when to have done, and the longer he has been occupied in copying a face or any particular feature, sees more and more in it, that he has left undone and can never hope to do. ”

“ About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden. To copy any performance in a way to do it honor we must discern and adapt its art without mimicking its act. To miscopy is far easier—we have only to mimic the act and murder the art. I once heard a [Pg 144] man ask an architect if it would not answer to give his plan to the contractor and let him work it out without the architect's supervision. ”

“ Instead of for ever copying, it will be found of more importance to be continually exercising the memory. 'A mere imitator or copyist,' says Dagley, 'dare not lose sight of his model, lest he should lose himself!'
In sketching from nature, always survey the object at every point the nature of the ground will permit, as it prevents the disappointment arising from having completed your work, and afterwards seeing it from a point that would have given you greater advantages. ”

“ Those who gained their living by copying books found so great an advantage in the adoption of the swift, or tachygraphic character, that they presently sought to improve it by every device that might favour the uninterrupted movement of the pen ”

“ Beta: People could sell or rent copy machines and other things you need, right? By the way, if copying takes money and time, then people may come along and do it for others, right? What are those people called, that copy for others?
Teacher: Publishers?
Beta: Publishers.
Alpha: So what? The artist still gets nothing. Only your “publishers” and the factories that make those copy machines. ... That’s not fair!
Beta: Hmm, this is interesting. ... This planet by magic momentarily makes a work as famous as it is good, right? ”

“ Even when it descends to mere copying, which its commercial associations unfortunately encourage, it requires for its effective execution exceptional skill, unremitting patience, and a more than average degree of artistic feeling. ”

“ You are not expected to write frequent, or long letters, as your time is much occupied; but when parcels that have cost some pains in the composition, and great trouble in the copying, are sent to you, I should at least be put out of suspense, by the immediate acknowledgment, per return of post, addressed directly to Ravenna. I am naturally—knowing what continental posts are—anxious to hear that they are arrived; especially as I loathe the task of copying so much, that if there was a humanPg 302 being that could copy my blotted MSS. he should have all they can ever bring for his trouble. ”

“ Those who have not sufficient time for a careful and thorough study of an early MS. will find it [p071] easier to begin with a simplified and modernised writing, such as Script I. (fig. 49) .
Fig. 49.
Before copying a hand it is well to examine carefully the manuscript from which it is taken: observe its general appearance: note the character and mode of the ruling, and the sizes and relative proportions of page, text, margins, and ornaments. ”

“ But copying has now taken on new dimensions with the development of photocopying devices by which any quantity of material can be reproduced readily and in multiple copies. Researchers need to have available, for reference and study, the growing mass of published material in their particular fields. ”

“ A greater degree of accuracy was guaranteed by printing than by manual copying. Before the invention of printing, it was well-nigh impossible to secure two copies of any work that would be exactly alike. ”

“ Whatever may be the causes of this defect, those who are extensively conversant with the publications of our own times must be aware, that the practice of copying from books, instead of having recourse to Nature herself, has not yet been relinquished; though nothing is more clear than that there can be no real progress in natural history without authenticating the observations of preceding writers by examining the objects which they have described, and by noting the particulars in which they are erroneous. ”

“ The copyists and calligraphers were stimulated to do their best by the religious zeal of wealthy laymen who frequently gave to religious houses large sums of money for the copying and ornamentation of books. ”

“ The old, unprotected designs, which may be copied by any one, are little in demand, and during the process of generations of recopying, many of them have so greatly deteriorated as to become scarcely recognizable. ”

“ A copy, qua copy, can never be the equal of the exemplar, and it may be much its inferior. This deterioration increases with the number of successive copyings. Let us suppose that from a text which we will call A a copy has been made which we will call B, and from this again a copy which we will call C. If the copyist of B goes wrong once and the copyist of C twice in a hundred times, then, assuming that there is no coincidence or cancelling of errors, the relative correctness of the three texts A, B, C will be 100 (absolute correctness) , 99 and 97.02. ”

“ The copy is to the original as the pallid, smart, inane new wax work-group is to the vigorous, earnest, dignified group of living men and women whom it professes to duplicate. There is a mellow richness, a subdued color, in the old pictures, which is to the eye what muffled and mellowed sound is to the ear. That is the merit which is most loudly praised in the old picture, and is the one which the copy most conspicuously lacks, and which the copyist must not hope to compass. ”

“ The copy-reader must transform the weak, rambling sentence into a firm, coherent statement with an emphatic beginning. For the trite, colorless word or phrase, he must substitute the fresh, picturesque one. The too figurative flights of exuberant fancy in one young reporter’s copy must be toned down, and the bald, prosaic narrative or description in another’s given life and interest. In short, the copy-reader’s work is constructive as well as critical; it is as important for him to rewrite and rearrange as to cut out and boil down. ”

“ As for me, what care bestowed upon it!—but what annoyances! The publisher wanted to summons me to deliver the manuscript more rapidly! I have only worked at it eight months; yet to all the world this delay—put it in comparison with the work—will seem diabolical. You shall have an ordinary copy, in which I want you to read the composition. Do not buy it; wait, I entreat you, for the handy volume I intend for you, besides the grand copy. You know how much I care that you shall read me in a copy that I have chosen. It is a gospel; it is a book to be read at all moments. ”

“ B is a MS. book, into which, in '83, I copied from A certain poems of which the author had kept no copy. He was remiss in making fair copies of his work, and his autograph of The Deutschland having been (seemingly) lost, I copied that poem and others from A at his request. After that date he entered more poems in this book as he completed them, and he also made both corrections of copy and emendations of the poems which had been copied into it by me. Thus, if a poem occur in both A and B, then B is the later and, except for overlooked errors of copyist, the better authority. ”

“ Making Copy is an Art. The world’s universities do not teach how to prepare copy for printers. Often college men are not only poor writers of English, but they are as careless of the niceties of typography as are printers in most houses, editors of some publications, ministers, school-teachers, reporters, and public officers. In most manuscripts inconsistencies abound. Numbers, for example, should be spelled out, or written in arabic or in roman numerals, yet the three methods are sometimes seen on one page of copy. ”

“ Some are more industriously employed in writing their copies, which they perform seated on the ground, with their paper on a copy-board—a piece of planed deal, the size of the copy, an appendage now nearly exploded—their cheek-bones laid within half an inch of the left side of the copy, and the eye set to guide the motion of the hand across, and to regulate the straightness of the lines and the forms of the letters. ”

“ Gradually however as people woke up to a realisation of the state of affairs specially with reference to the masses and their ignorance of "Reading, Writing and Counting," more attention was directed to these subjects and the headline copy book was one of the innovations which merged into life. These copy-books have grown and increased to an alarming extent during the past forty years. We say alarming, for the wisdom of having such a variety of antagonistic styles is much to be questioned. ”

“ An imitation is always thought of as inferior to the original; as, an imitation of Milton. A replica is a copy of a work of art by the maker of the original. In law, a copy of an instrument has in itself no authority; the signatures, as well as other matters, may be copied; a duplicate is really an original, containing the same provisions and signed by the same persons, so that it may have in all respects the same force and effect ”

“ Our language generally confounds, or rather those who use it, when they speak of the art, the two words copy and imitation, though essentially different in their operation, as well as their meaning. An eye geometrically just, with a hand implicitly obedient, is the requisite of the former, without all choice, without selection, amendment, or omission; whilst choice, directed by judgment and taste, constitutes the essence of imitation, and raises the humble copyist to the noble rank of an artist. ”

“ The “third proof” is now sent to the author, editor, or publisher, with so much copy as may cover it, the copy-holder being careful, however, to retain the “mark-off”; i. e., the sheet on which is marked off the place where the next “first proof” is to begin. But when the work is of such sort as not to require extraordinary care, the second proof is sent out, a single reading by copy being deemed sufficient. If the work is read twice by copy, only one reader should attend to the punctuation. ”

“ If there is no way of finding out [3] what the sentence means, follow copy. Insert no punctuation marks which you are not sure are needed.
Punctuation as we know it is of recent invention. The practice of the art of printing brought the necessity for a defined and systematized use of the points which had, most of them, long been in existence, but which had been used largely according to the personal preferences of the scribes or copyists. With the coming of the new methods of book reproduction came the recognized need for standardization and systematization. ”