Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1886-03-27
THE PRINTERS CUB.
Mark Twaiu's Response 70 the Toast q
The Conpositor.v

Mark Twain's Response 10 the Toast of
THE Compositor."
Mark Twain recently dined with the Tv-
pothetp, an association of New Workers
having more or less to do with types. The
occasion was the commemoration of Ben
jamin Franklin's birthday the place Del
monicos. In response to the toast of
THE Compositor," Mark Twain described
the life of a cub printer of forty years ago
1--WE take the report from the New York
Publishers Weekly of January 23d)
The Chairman's historical "reminiscences
of Gutenberg have caused me to fall into
"reminiscences. for | myself am something
of an antiquity. All 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 thir-
ty-five years ago. | was no stranger to
him. knew him well. built his fire for
him in the winter mornings | brought his
water from the village pump; | swept ont
his office; picked up his type from under
his stand; and, if he was there to see put
the good type in his case and the broken
ones among the " hell matter" and if he
wasn't there to see / dumped it all with
the "pi' on the composing-stone, for that
was the furtIye fashion of the cub, and /
was cub. 1 wetted down the paper Sat
urdays, | turned it Sundays, for this was a
country weekly. | rolled, ! washed the
rollers, washed the forms. | folded the
papers, / carried them around at dawn
Thursday mornings. The carrier was then
an object of interest to all the dogs in
town. If | had saved up all the bites | re-
ceived, ! could keep NJ. Pasteur busy for a
year. | enveloped the papers that were for
the mail. We had hundred town sub
scribers and three hundred and fifty coun-
try t,n I
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 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 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 q
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 column and half
long, loaded long primer, and sign them
" Junius," or Veritas,r or " Vox Populi."
or some other high-sounding rot and
then, after it was set up, be would come in
and say he had changed his mind-which
was gilded figure of speech, because he
hadn't any-and order it to be left out
We couldn't stand such 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.
Well, we did have one or two kinds of
bogus" Whenever there was barbecue
or a circus, or baptiZing, we knocked off
for half 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 galley of it standing, and kept
on slapping the same old patches of it in.
every now and then, till it got dangerous.
Also, in the early days of the telegraph. we
used to economic Oh the news We picked
out the items that were pointless and bar
rem of information, ana stood them on
galley, and changed the dates and locali-
tiles. and used them over and over again,
till the public interest III them was worn to
the bone. We marked the ads, but we sell
dom paid any attention To the marks after
ward SO the life of "td'' adj. and q .'tf-'
ad. was equally eternal. | have seen
" I'd notice of a sherili's sale still booming
serenely along two years after the sale was
over, the sheriff dead, and the whole cir
cumstance become ancient history.