The McCook tribune. (McCook, Neb.) 1886-1936, 1886-02-11
MARX TWAIN AS a PRINTER.


Office of n Weekly Paper.
Response to a Toast at a Ben Franklin Banquet
"All things change in the procession
OF years, and it may be thatI am among
strangers. 1t may be that the printer
OF to-day is n o the printer of thirty-five
years ago. l was no stranger t O him. !
knew him well. / built his fire for him
In the winter mornings; [ brought his
water from the village pump; [ swept
out his Office; l picked up his type from
under his stand; and, if he was there to
see, l put the good type in his case, and
the broken ones among the hell NATTER
and, if he wasn't there to see, l dumped
1t all with the 'pi' on the imposing stone
for that was the furtive fashion of the
cub, and | was a cub. l wetted down
the paper Saturdays, 1 turned it Sun
days-for this was a country weekly; I
rolled, | washed the rollers, I washed
the forms, l folded the papers, l carried
them around at dawn Thursday morn
lngs, L enveloped the papers that were
for the native had 100 town SUBJ
scribers and $50 country ones; the town
subscribers paid in groceries and the
country ones in cabbage and cordwood
when they paid at all, which was only
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 tt 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 n subscriber who paid cash. and
he was more trouble to us than all the
rest. he bought us, once a year, body
and SOIL, for 81. He used to modify
our politics every which way, and he
made US change u religion four times
in five years. II we evor tried 10 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 a half
long, loaded 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 ordered 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
articles to the rival paper in the next
village, and put it in. Whenever their
was Il barbecue. or a circus, or a baptiz-
ing, we knocked off for half a day, and
then to make up for short matter we
would turn over adds-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 patches of it
in, every now and then, till it got dam
gerous. Also, in the early days of the
telegraph we used to economize On the
the news. We picked out the items
that were pointless and barren of infor-
nation and stood them on a galley, and
changed the dates and localities, and
used them over and owe again till the
public interest in them was worn to the
bone. We marked the adds. but we
seldom paid any attention to the marks
afterward; so the life OF Il I'd add and a
If add was equally eternal. | have
seen a It'd notice of Il 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 adds were
patent medicine stereotypes. and we used
to fence with them. Life was easy
with us; if we pied a form we suspend
ed till next week, and we always sus-
pended every now and then when the
fishing was good, and explained it by
the illness of the editor, Il paltry excuse,
because that kind of a paper was just
as well off with Il sick editor as a we'll
one, and better off with Il dead one than
with either of them. He was full
of blessed egotism and placid
self-importance, but he didn't
know as much as a three
EN- quad. 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 fiatulence and
soaring confidence upon the vastest SUBJ
iects, but putting aims gifts of wedding
cake, salty ice cream, abnormal water
melons and sweet potatoes the size of
YOUR leg, wasshis best hold. He was al
ways a poet-a kind of poet of the Car
rIer'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 gener-
ally 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
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 minion, for four hours on q stretch,
had appeared in that office, they would
have been received as accomplishers of
the supremely impossible. and drenched
with hospitable beer until the brewery
was bankrupt.
II can see that printing office of pre-
historic times yet, with its horse bills
on the walls, it's ID box clogged with
because we always stood the
oo,dla in the sk' h0y NIGHTS. ifs towel.