A friend who does Braille transcriptions asked about the spacing of
contractions in Life on the Mississippi. She said it looks as though there
is a space
before the apostrophe whenever a contraction is written. (She sent a pdf of
the
first page of Chapter Nine.)

I checked my 1883 Cambridge Press edition and I can see the chasm. (I wanted
a second opinion, so I looked at the Oxford facsimile edition, but it turns
out to be from the Cambridge Press also.)

The other facsimiles in the Oxford series that happen to sit on my shelf
close to Life on the Mississippi do not show the same spacing prior to
apostrophes.

Is the extra spacing a quirk of the press, of that year, or of that book? Or
what?

Dennis Kelly