A short history of proofreading

Before a page is printed, someone reads a trial copy of it, the proof, and marks what’s wrong. The marks they use are older than you might think.

The corrector and the reader

Printing made correction a trade. Printers hired correctors, usually educated men, to check the type against the author’s copy while a second person read the copy aloud. Some did more than mend errors: in 1543 Andreas Osiander, seeing Copernicus’s On the Revolutions through the press, added an unsigned preface that presented its theory as only a hypothesis.¹

In 1683–84 Joseph Moxon set out the routine in his manual of printing, Mechanick Exercises. The compositor brings a proof; a reader reads the copy aloud; the corrector follows the proof and marks each fault in the right-hand margin, with a stroke after it. A good corrector, Moxon wrote, needed “a quick Eye to espy the smallest Fault”. Several of his marks are still in use: a caret where something is left out, a sign for taking a word out, and a curve to swap words set in the wrong order.²

The marks

Each correction is marked twice: in the line, to show where, and in the margin, to say what, closed with a stroke so a crowded margin stays readable.³ These are drawn in our own hand; the exact shapes vary a little from one chart to another.^{4, 5}

• Insert. A caret where something is missing; what goes in is written in the margin.

• Delete. Strike it through and put the delete sign in the margin. Its name, dele, is Latin for “delete!”.⁶

• Transpose. One curve over the first word and under the second swaps them.

• Close up. Two arcs, over and under a gap, take the space out.

• New paragraph. A bracket where the break goes, and the pilcrow, ¶, in the margin.⁵

• Stet. Dots under a correction cancel it: let it stand. More about stet.

Standards

Britain set its marks down in BS 5261, first published in 1976 and revised in 2005. The international standard, ISO 5776, was rewritten in 2016 on the basis of the British marks, with Chinese and Japanese added, and Korean in 2022.⁷ In the United States, the Chicago Manual of Style keeps its own chart.⁴

When a proof wasn’t read

In 1631 the king’s printers in London, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, issued a Bible that left one word, not, out of the seventh commandment, turning a ban on adultery into an order. They were fined £300. It is known as the Wicked Bible.⁸

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