MARK TWAIN WITH THE TYPOTHETÆ.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2155, 1 May 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

MARK TWAIN WITH THE TYPOTHETÆ.

Mark Twain recently dined with the Typothet®, an association of New Yorkers having more or less to do with types. The occasion was the comment* oration of Benjamin Franklin's birthday, the place Delmonico's. In response to the toast of "The Compositor," Mark Twain described the life of a cab printer of forty years ago (we take the report from the New York Publishers' Weekly of January 23) :— The chairman's historical reminiscences of Gutenberg have caused me to fall into reminiscences, for I myself am something of an antiquity. Ail things chance in the procession af years, and it may be that lam among strangeri. 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 was there to see, I pat the good type in his case and the broken ones among the •' hell matter "; and if ho wasn't there to see, I dumped it all with the " pi" on the imposingstone, for that was the furtive fashion of the cub, and I was a cub. I wetted down the paper Saturdays, I tamed it Sundays, for this was a country weekly. I rolled, I washed the rollers, I washed the formes, I folded the papers, I carried them around at dawn Thursday mornings. The carrier was then an object of interest to all the dogs of the town. If I had saved up all the bites I ever received, I could keep M. Pasteur buy for » year. I enveloped the papers that ' were for the mail. We bad a hundred ( town subscribers and three hundred and fifty country ones. The town subscribers paid in groceries, and the country ones in cabbages and cordwood—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 —this 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 boas failed to connect, he stopped hi 9 paper. We were just infested with critics, aud we tried to satisfy them all over. \Ve bail one subscriber who paid cash, and he was more trouble to us than all the rest. He bought us, once a year, body ond soul, for two dollars, lie used to modify our polities every which way, and he made us change our religion f«nr tunes in five years. If we e\er tried to reason with him, he would tin eaten to .-top his piper, and, of course, that meant bankrupcty and destruction. That man used to write articles a column ami a half long, leaded long primer, aiul siuii them " Jumus," or "Ventas," or "Vox Populi," or rome other high-sounding rot ; and then, after it was set up, he would come in aud say lie had rlnnged his mind—which was a gilded figure of speech, because he indent any —ami order it to be left out. We couldn't stand such a waste as that; we couldu'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 9liort matter we would " turn over ads." —turn over the whole page aud 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 economise on the news. We picked out the items that were pointless aud barren of information, and fetoocl 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 afterwards; so the life of a " td " ad, and a " tf" ad. was equally eternal. I have seeu a "til" notice of a sheriffs sale still booming serenely along two years after the sale was over, tlie sheriff dead, and the whole circumstance become auoier.t history. Most of the yearly ads. ucre patent medicine stereotypes, and we used to fence with them. Life was easy with U 9; if we pied a form we suspended till next week, and we always suspended every now and then when the fishing was good, and explained it by the illness of the editor, a paltry excuse, because that kind of a paper was just as weJl off with a sick editor as a well oue, and better off with a dead ono thru; with either of them. lfe was full of blessed egotism and placid sdf-impoitAuce; but he didn't know as ■nuch as a3 em quail. He never set any type except in the rush of the last day, and then he would smouch all the poetry, and leave the rest to " jeff" for the solid takes. He wrote with impressive flatulence and soaring confidence upon the \astest subjects; bat puffing almsgifts of wedding cake, salty ice cream, abnormal water melons, and sweet potatoes the size of yonr leg was his best hold. He was always a poet—a kind of poet of the Carrier's Address breed —and whenever his intellect suppurated, and he read the result to the printers and asked for their opinion, they were very frank and straightforward about it. They generally scraped their rules on the boxes all the time he was reading, and called it " hog-wash" when he got through. All this was thirty-five years ago, when the man who could set seven huudred an hour could put on just as many airs as he wanted to; aud if these .New York meu, who recently on a wager, set two thousand an hour of solid minion for four hours on a stretch had appeared in that office, they would have been received as accomplishes of the supremely impossible, and drenched -with i.Oapiuble beer till the brewery was bankrupt. i oau ate that ptiutiug office of pieiiistonc time? yet, with its horse bills on the walla ; 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 sigos and symbols that marked the establishment of that kind in the Mississippi valley ; aud I can sco also the tramping " jour " wbo flitted by in the summer and tarried a day, with his wallet stuffed with one shirt and a hatful of handbills; for if fie could»& get any type to eet he would do a temperance lecture. His way of life was simple, his needs not complex; all he wanted was plate aud 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 for* gotten age to unfamiliar ears, so I will " make even " and stop.

In Home—old Rome, you know — there are thirty daily papers—about one to each ten thousand of population. There are also one thousand weeklies. This in comparison with boastful American cities, where " everybody reads, you know," makes a patriotic America quill driver tired,