Talk:The American West

Ep 7 weirdness
I always pause whenever documents or newspapers come on TV to read through them so I noticed this weird typo in Frontier Justice. In the last sixth of the show (~50 for me PVRing with commercials, earlier if you have a version without them) they are showing newspaper ads for Billy the Kid's death.

One is shown from July 22, 1881:
 * " BILLY, THE KID."
 * The Notorious Outlaw at Last Meets His Death.
 * DENVER COL July 18. - The Last Vegas
 * N. M. Gazette positive information
 * that " Billy, the Kid," the notorious mur-
 * derer and outlaw, who for several years has

One pattern that seems strange there is with quotation marks. It appears after the opening quotation mark that they leave a space, but there is no space left prior to the closing quotation mark. Does anyone know if this was standard at the time? I haven't reviewed many papers from that era.

Following the above dated article is one they don't show a date for:
 * BILLY THE KID.
 * The True History of the Boy-
 * Devil's Terrible Explosits.
 * "He Only Killed Eleven Men
 * That I know of" - De-
 * tails of His Own Death.

I guess that shows it wasn't mandatory to have a space after an opening quote. This is too zoomed in to see which paper it was from, or its date, but it made me wonder, was 'explosits' a typo, a mistakenly inserted S, or an accepted alternate spelling of Exploits? It seems like a pretty big error to not notice when it's in the headline like that. Ranze (talk) 12:19, 27 July 2016 (UTC)


 * You'll also notice "The Last Vegas" typo in the first example. It should be Las Vegas, as in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Both examples are evidence that humans do make mistakes and proofreaders (or lack thereof) also fail. It also depends on the printing machine used. That newspaper might not have an early linotype machine but even those were pains to use apparently. Still, proofing before mass production is a lost art. —  Wylie pedia  12:46, 27 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Here's the same report from The Cleveland Leader. —  Wylie pedia  13:14, 27 July 2016 (UTC)