"Quien Vive?"

In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo last week, Brazilian publishers were picking up the pieces left by the wild mobs that looted, sacked and wrecked pro-Washington Luis newspaper offices at the end of Brazil's revolution (TIME, Nov. 3).

Most graphic picture of the mob attack, which accounted for the muzzling of between 50 and 60 Brazilian papers opposed to the revolution, was given by the United Press's Brazil Manager C. Arthur Powell in Editor & Publisher of last fortnight. Long trained as correspondent for the Associated Press in Havana until six months ago, sandy-haired Reporter Powell earned from admiring Cubans the name Car a Dura (Hard Face), is not prone to exaggerate: Worst damage ("several million dollars") suffered by the Rio newspaper plants was inflicted upon A Noite in its new 24-story building, highest in South America, which houses the United Press Bureau.

Reporter Powell reported that the mob of hundreds, wearing red hatbands and armed with table-legs and other handy cudgels, "gained admittance when a two-ton truck backed up ... and forced the doors. Everything was seized and destroyed, from lead pencils to printing presses. . . . The mob stormed the building and threw furnishings into the street [and burned them], smashed machinery and turned on water taps on several floors. The offices of Geraldo Rocha, proprietor of A Noite and one of the richest industrialists of Brazil, were entered and the furnishings wrecked. Rocha was not there at the time. Ismael Maia, manager of the paper, however, was subjected to rough treatment."

When the mob began indiscriminately to invade rented offices in the building, Reporter Powell's assistant Lester Ziffren ran to the U. S. consulate on another floor, returned with a U. S. flag which he draped over the United Press doorway. ". . . The mob leaders, not wishing to cause a conflict with the U. S., stood by and ordered everything packed up lest it be damaged in the fire and flood which followed ... all we lost . . . was a fountain pen which was picked up by someone and a photograph of Julio Prestes [onetime] president-elect of Brazil [which was confiscated]."

Reporter Powell's wife and four-year-old son, accompanied by a maid, were courteously ushered out of the building by the mobsters. But earlier, in the tonneau of their automobile, they had seen their native chauffeur shot dead when he ignored a rioter's order to halt.

The six other newspapers in Rio de Janeiro to share, in lesser degree, the fate of A Noite were Critic, A Ordem, Vanguarda, Gazeta de Noticias, 0 Paiz and A Noticia. Some of them thought to remove their newsprint to comparative safety in the street. But there the rolls were set upon, unwound by urchins.

Concluded Reporter Powell: "Right now the situation here for newspaper men when they are challenged with 'Quien Vive?" is to answer 'Whom are you Viveing?', for changes are rapid."

Gibbonish

In 23 years a newshawk and war correspondent, notably for the Chicago Tribune, Floyd Phillips Gibbons climbed to the first rank of reporters. He won fame of the sort that comes to a No. 1 newsman; but not many outside his profession and the readers of the Tribune and Liberty knew a year and a half ago who Floyd Gibbons was. Then he went into radio broadcasting. Last week, famed Fastest Talker Floyd Gibbons returned to newspaper work as a circulation drawing-card. His column, "Floyd Gibbons Speaking--" began daily appearances in 42 newspapers served by famous Features Syndicate, Inc.

The column is much like a miniature edition of the 15-minute news summary, in machine-gun stream of syllables, which Reporter Gibbons gave as a daily radio broadcast for The Literary Digest last spring. In an effort to recapture the breathlessness, the staccato note, of the Gibbons chatter, the Evening World separates the paragraphs with drawn lightning-flashes.

Some Gibbonish of the first day: "You know this columning business is SH-S-H! It's a racket. The boys all have their territory charted out, with grim red lines marking the boundaries -- 'OH, YOU TAKE THE HIGH BROW AND I'LL TAKE THE LOW BROW'-- That's the way the system works -- and as the dirt comes to me, an amateur starter is about as welcome as a stray Hip Sing in Mott Street. . . . Discovery that K. K. K. stood for 'Ku Klux Kon' has reduced the membership in the Klan from 9,000,000 five years ago to 35,000 now. Tough on the Imperial Wizard and the percentage-boy organizers, but I guess nobody else is weeping -- if we count out the pillow case industry. ... In New Jersey I see the Prohibition administrator is interviewing reporters through a peephole. Sorry, boys. Can't be too careful these days. . . ."

Colyumist Gibbons, 43, younger-looking, bulky, flat-nosed, wears a white linen patch over his left-eye socket. The eye was shot out by a machine gun at Chateau-Thierry. When he broadcasts he rushes into the studio at the last minute, tosses his coat aside, keeps his hat on, sits down at a table with cigaret in hand and rattles off 217 words per minute.

Untrue Type

Thrifty Manhattan housewives who scanned an early edition of the New York Telegram one day last week, blinked at a large advertisement for R. H. Macy & Co. Macy's, they well knew, boasts a policy of underselling; but it seemed astounding even for Macy's to announce in big type: "These coats are usually $58.75--$8.94." Still more baffling was the line below: "These dresses are usually $13.74-- $48.75."

Next day the Telegram priced the figures in their proper arrangement--$58.75 coats at $48.75; $13.74 dresses at $8.84-- and humbly claimed blame for the printer's blunder. Also printed was a courtly exchange of flourishes between Publisher Roy Wilson Howard who "instantly offered to pay the difference in price to Macy's," and Macy's who "refused on the ground that it was distinctly unfair to any newspaper to penalize it so heavily. . . ."

Used to seeing and deciphering typographical errors, few newspaper readers know precisely how they come about. Characteristic mistakes in news texts are transposition ("amy" for "may," "ear" for "era") and substitution ("bottle" for "battle," "love" for "live"). Printing of "slays" for "slaps" once resulted in a $50,000 libel suit against the Telegram (TIME, June 9). Such errors are caused by a finger-slip of the linotype operator, whose typesetting machine has a lower-case keyboard arranged in this manner:

E S C V X

T H M B Z

A R F G

O D W K

I L Y Q

N U P J*

Most frequent and most distressing errors result from the substitution of wrong vowels. But according to Mergenthaler Linotype Co., a practiced operator not too severely pressed will make only three or four mistakes to a newspaper galley (approximately a 20 in. column of type lines).

Many a compositor and newsman keeps a scrapbook of the most devastating misprints that come to his eye, most of them unreprintable. But few collections, if any, can rival that of Louis N. Seitel of the Brooklyn Public Library who with serious purpose for ten years has combed books as well as periodicals for errors of fact, expression and typography. His trophies number about 10,000. Typical "howler" in the Seitel collection: (from Short Stories of Soviet Russia) "Then, above his eye, a fish flashed out and broke his teeth."

*The first two vertical lines, reading downward "etaoin shrdlu," often appear in print. Having felt himself make a slip, the linotypist will run his finger down those two lines to make an obviously pied line of type which the proof staff will surely, but does not always, catch.

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