The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1886-03-19
MARK TWAIN AS A PRINTER.
His RecOllections of Early Days in
the Office of a Weekly Paper.

Response to Toast at Ben franklin Ban
quet
tAll things change in the procession
of years, and it may be that am among
strangers. 1t may be that the printer
of to-day is not the printer of thirty
five years ago. 1 was no stranger to
him. l knew him we'll 1 built his fire
for him in the winter mornings; 1
brought his water from the village
pump; swept out his office; picked
up his type from under his stand; and,
if he was there 10 see, L put the good
type IN his case, and the broken one s
among the hell matter and. if he
wasn't there to see, dumped it all with
the 'pi' on the imposing stone-for that
was the furtive fashion of the cub, and
was cub. | wetted down the paper
Saturdays, turned it Sundays : for
this was country weekly; | rolled, I
washed the rollers, washed the forms,
L folded the papers, carried them
around at dawn Thursday mornings,
enveloped the papers that were for the
maIl-we had 100 town subscribers and
$50 country ones; the town subscribers
paid in groceries and the country ones
IN cabbage and cordToo1-when they
paid at all, which was only sometimes,
and then we always stated the fact in
the paper and gave them 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 1t,
and every time the boss failed to con-
meet, 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 to US than all the rest. He
bought US once a year, body and soul,
for g 90. He used to modify our poll
tics 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 bank
ruptcy and destruction. That man used
to write articles a column and half
long. loaded long primer, and sign them
'Junius' or 'Veri as or 'Vox Ropuli,'
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 gilded figure of speech, be-
cause he hadn't any-and order it to be
left out. We couldn't stand such a
waste as that; 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. Whenever there
was barbecue, or circus, or baptiz-
ing, we knocked off for half day, and
then to make up for short matter we
would turn over advs-turn over the
whole page and duplicate it. The other
bogus was deep philosophical stuff,
which We judged nobody ever read; 50
we kept galley of it'standing and kept
on slapping the same old patches OF it
in, every now and then, till it got dan
gerous. Also, in the early days of the
telegraph we used to economic on the
news. We picked out the items that
were pointless and barren of informa-
ton 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 advs, but we
seldom paid any attention to the marks
afterwards; so the life of It'd adv and
'tf' adv was equally eternal. l have
seen It'd 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 advs were
patent medicine stereotypes, and we
used to fence with them. Life was easy
with US; if we pied form we suspended
till next week, and we always suspended
every now and then when the fishing
was good, and explained it-by the llness
- 81
that kind of paper was just as well off
with sick editor as well one, and bet
ter off with dead one than with either
of them. Hewas full of blessed egotism
and placid self-importance, but he didn't
know as much as three EN- quad He
never set any type except in the rush of
the last day, and then he would snouch
all the poetry and leave the rest to Jeff
for the solid takes. He wrote with i'm
pressiye hatulence and soaring conf
dence upon the vastest subjects, but
pulling aims gifts OF wedding cake, salty
ice cream, abnormal watermelons and
sweet potatoes the size of your leg, was
his best hold. He was always a poet
kind ofpoet of the Carriers Address
breed : and whenever hisintellect sup
purated and he read the result to the
printers and asked for their opinion,
they were very frank and straightfoT-
ward about it. They generally scraped
their rules on the boxes all the time be
was reading, and called 1t hog wash
when he got through All this was
thirty-fiye years ago, when the man who
could set 700 an hour could put on just
as many airs as he wanted to; and if
these New York men, Who recently. on
a wager, set 1000 an hour, solid miniop,
for four hours on a stretch, had ap-
peared in that office, they would have
been received as &C .omplishers of the
supremely impossible, and drenched
with hospitable beer until the brewery
was bankrupt.
81 can see that printing offices of pre-
historic times yet, with us horse bills
on the walls, it d box clogged with
tallow. because. W. always Stood the
candle in the k box nights; its towel,
which was not considered soifed until it
could stand aloae, and other SIGHTS and
symbols that marked the establishment
of that kind in the Mississippi valley;
and can see also the tramping Jour
who fitted yin the summer and tarried