Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1886-02-12
MARK TWAIN AS A "DEVlL."
ON THE NEWSPAPER OF as YEARS AGO

York TypothetH
The chairman's historical "reminiscences
of Gutenberg have caused me to fall into
"reminiscences, for | myself am some
thing of an antiquity. All things change
i'll the procession of years, and it may be
that | am among strangers. 1t may be
the printer of to-day is not the printer of
30 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
out 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 imposing stone
for that was the furtive fashion of the
cub, and was cub. wetted down the
paper on Saturdays. | turned it Sundays
for this was country weekly; roll
ed, washed the rollers, washed the
forms, | folded the papers, | carried them
around at dawn Thursday mornings,
enveloped the papers for the mail-we
had 100 town subscribers and $50 country
ones; the town subscribers paid in gro
ceries. 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 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 to us than all the rest
He bought US, once year, body and soul,
for 50. 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 de-
struction. That man used to write arti-
cles IA column and Il half long, loaded
long primer, and sign them "Junius" or
'Veritas' or "VoX Populi.'o 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
o. Ia, ln, l,,'t
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 al
ways took the leads out. altered the sigma
ture, credited the article to the rival pa
per in the next village, and put it in.
Well. we did have one or two kinds of
cue, or circus, or Il baptizing, we knock
ed off for half a day land then to make up
for short matter we would "turn over
ads"-turn over the whole page and du-
plicate it. The other bogus was deep
philosophical stuff, which we Judged no.
body 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 ii got dangerous. Also, in the early
days of the telegraph we used to econo-
miZe on the news. We picked out the
items that We're 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 sell
dom paid any attention to the marks
afterward; so the fife of Il I'D" al and Il
"tf' al was equally eternal. | have seen
Il I'D" notice of shert1's sale still boom
ing serenely along two year, after the
sale was over, the sheriff dead, and the
whole circumstances become ancient his
tory. Most of the yearly ads We're pat
ent medicine >tereotyped and we used 10
fence with them.
Life was easy with US. If we pied a
form we suspended till next week, and
we always suspended every now and then
when the fishing was good, and explain
ed it by the illness of the editor, paltry
excuse, because that kind of paper was
just as well off with a sick editor as a
well one, and better off with dead one
than with either of them. He was full
of blessed egotism and placid self-impor-
lance, but he didn't know as much as a
three-em 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 flatu-
lence and soaring confidence upon the
vastest subjects; but putting aims gifts
of wedding-cake, salty ice cream, abnor-
mai watermelons, and sweet potatoes the
size of your leg was his best hold. lie
was always poet-a kind of poet of the
Carriers address breed-and whenever
his intellect suppurated, and he read the