ut. 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 u