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THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER
ADDRESS AT THE TYPOTHETAE DINNER GIVEN AT DELMONICO'S,
JANUARY 18, 1886, COMMEMORATING THE BIRTHDAY OF
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Mr. Clemens responded to the toast "The Compositor."
The chairman's historical reminiscences of Gutenberg have caused me to
fall into reminiscences, for I myself am something of an antiquity.
All things change in the procession of years, and it may be that I am
among strangers. It may be that the printer of to-day is not the printer
of thirty-five years ago. I was no stranger to him. I knew him well.
I built his fire for him in the winter mornings; I brought his water from
the village pump; I swept out his office; I picked up his type from under
his stand; and, if he were there to see, I put the good type in his case
and the broken ones among the "hell matter"; and if he wasn't there to
see, I dumped it all with the "pi" on the imposing-stone--for that was
the furtive fashion of the cub, and I was a cub. I wetted down the paper
Saturdays, I turned it Sundays--for this was a country weekly; I rolled,
I washed the rollers, I washed the forms, I folded the papers, I carried
them around at dawn Thursday mornings. The carrier was then an object of
interest to all the dogs in town. If I had saved up all the bites I ever
received, I could keep M. Pasteur busy for a year. I enveloped the
papers that were for the mail--we had a hundred town subscribers and
three hundred and fifty country ones; the town subscribers paid in
groceries and the country ones in cabbages and cord-wood--when they paid
at all, which was merely sometimes, and then we always stated the fact in
the paper, and gave them a puff; and if we forgot it they stopped the
paper. Every man on the town list helped edit the thing--that is,
he gave orders as to how it was to be edited; dictated its opinions,
marked out its course for it, and every time the boss failed to connect
he stopped his paper. We were just infested with critics, and we tried
to satisfy them all over. We had one subscriber who paid cash, and he
was more trouble than all the rest. He bought us once a year, body and
soul, for two dollars. He used to modify our politics every which way,
and he made us change our religion four times in five years. If we ever
tried to reason with him, he would threaten to stop his paper, and, of
course, that meant bankruptcy and destruction. That man used to write
articles a column and a half long, leaded long primer, and sign them
"Junius," or "Veritas," or "Vox Populi," or some other high-sounding rot;
and then, after it was set up, he would come in and say he had changed
his mind-which was a gilded figure of speech, because he hadn't any--and
order it to be left out. We couldn't afford "bogus" in that office, so
we always took the leads out, altered the signature, credited the article
to the rival paper in the next village, and put it in. Well, we did have
one or two kinds of "bogus." Whenever there was a barbecue, or a circus,
or a baptizing, we knocked off for half a day, and then to make up for
short matter we would "turn over ads"--turn over the whole page and
duplicate it. The other "bogus" was deep philosophical stuff, which we
judged nobody ever read; so we kept a galley of it standing, and kept on
slapping the same old batches of it in, every now and then, till it got
dangerous. Also, in the early days of the telegraph we used to economize
on the news. We picked out the items that were pointless and barren of
information and stood them on a galley, and changed the dates and
localities, and used them over and over again till the public interest in
them was worn to the bone. We marked the ads, but we seldom paid any
attention to the marks afterward; so the life of a "td" ad and a "tf" ad
was equally eternal. I have seen a "td" notice of a sheriff's sale still
booming serenely along two years after the sale was over, the sheriff
dead, and the whole circumstance become ancient history. Most of the
yearly ads were patent-medicine stereotypes, and we used to fence with
them.
I can see that printing-office of prehistoric times yet, with its horse
bills on, the walls, its "d" boxes clogged with tallow, because we always
stood the candle in the "k" box nights, its towel, which was not
considered soiled until it could stand alone, and other signs and symbols
that marked the establishment of that kind in the Mississippi Valley;
and I can see, also, the tramping "jour," who flitted by in the summer
and tarried a day, with his wallet stuffed with one shirt and a hatful of
handbills; for if he couldn't get any type to set he would do a
temperance lecture. His way of life was simple, his needs not complex;
all he wanted was plate and bed and money enough to get drunk on, and he
was satisfied. But it may be, as I have said, that I am among strangers,
and sing the glories of a forgotten age to unfamiliar ears, so I will
"make even" and stop.
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