(Quilt from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, by Annie
Mae Young)
This poem seems to allude to the printer’s devils, the errand boys at a printer’s shop, so-called because the boys “do commonly and so black and bedaub themselves [with ink] that the workmen do jocosely call them devils,” according to Joseph Moxon's Mechanick exercises; or The doctrine of handy-works applied to the art of printing, published in London in 1683.
MORAL
Read, as the dreamer reads,
Only between the lines.
Everything else is indubitably
A misprint, a devilish misprint.
~ Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961), American poet
