Printer's Devil

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down until the average is three letters and a half. I can put 1,200 words on your page, and there's not another man alive that can come within two hundred of it. My page is worth $84 to me. It takes exactly as long to fill your magazine pages with long words as it does with short ones - four hours. Now then, look at the criminal injustice of this requirement of yours. I am careful, I am economical of my time and labor. For the family's sake I've got to be so. So I never write 'metropolis' for 7 cents, because I can get the same money for 'city.' I never write 'policeman,' because I can get the same price for 'cop'. And so on and so on. I never write 'valetudinarian' at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for 7 cents; I wouldn't do it for 15.

-Mark Twain

When he was twelve years old Samuel Clemens became apprenticed to his older brother Orion as a printer’s devil on the Hannibal Journal, handsetting type, and contributing an occasional story. In 1853 when he turned eighteen he headed east, working in Philadelphia and New York City. In this era of handset type his skill was in constant demand so he joined the printer’s union, jobbed around, and educated himself in the evenings in the public libraries. He returned to the Midwest after a few years, setting type and writing a few articles in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Keokuk, Iowa, until he met riverboat captain Horace Bixby in 1857.

Bixby agreed to train him as a riverboat pilot. Between 1858 and 1861, Clemens left behind the drudgery of printing to learn the romance and the ways of the Mississippi River, and he piloted steamboats between St. Louis and New Orleans until the Civil War stopped river traffic in 1861. Signing up as a soldier, he spent two weeks with the Marion Rangers, a ragtag Union militia, and then “lit out for the territories”, following his brother Orion who had become secretary to James W. Nye, the Governor of Nevada Territory.

It was in Nevada in 1863, while writing for the Virginia City Enterprise, that Clemens first became the writer Mark Twain. Within two years he moved to San Francisco to continue his newspaper career writing for the Morning Call and the Californian, and here he first met other writers, including Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. Like many celebrities, Clemens took on a new identity as he reinvented his life, and when he became Mark Twain he embarked on a life-long quest to get rich, be famous, and be accepted and honored as a writer of serious literature.

In 1866 he sailed to the Sandwich Islands as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. On his return to California he started to lecture on his travels and soon travelled east to New York to lecture and to publish his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Following his success he continued east on a pilgrimage cruise to Europe and the Holy Land and as a result of friendships he made on the cruise was introduced to his future wife Olivia Langdon when he returned to New York City in 1867.

In 1868 he finished his account of his trip, The Innocents Abroad and heavily courted Livy, the daughter of a wealthy timber and coal merchant, Jervis Langdon, from Elmira, NY. Livy was thoughtful and deep and an original in her own way and balanced Sam's often impetuous nature. “I take as much pride in her brains as I do in her beauty‚ & as much pride in her happy & equable disposition as I do in her brains.”

The next year they became engaged and he purchased one third ownership in the Buffalo Express with help from his future father-in-law. By the time he was 35 years old, through his own creativity and a good marriage, Sam Clemens had risen from rural printer’s devil to metropolitan publisher.

When The Innocents Abroad was published Mark Twain became a bestselling author, and after meeting William Dean Howells in Boston he became an esteemed member of the literary establishment as well. Like many celebrities of our day Mark Twain developed an outsized life style which demanded that he continued to generate wealth through his writings, constant lectures, and business ventures. He cultivated relationships not only with the literati, but also with the industrial magnates, such as Henry Rogers of Standard Oil, and Andrew Carnegie. In 1871, seeking literary companionship, he sold his interest in the Buffalo Express and moved his family to Nook Farm in Hartford to become part of the community started by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In 1873, in the book he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, he coined the term The Gilded Age and in his own life style also came to represent the excesses of that era. He led a grand life, which required a grand income. He consistently invested in business ventures to support his travels; when those businesses failed he was forced to continue his writing and lecturing to bail out his debts. Fortunately in 1876 he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in 1877 marketed the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook which actually worked and was somewhat successful. He started traveling abroad more, visiting Bermuda, and then living in Germany, Italy, France, and England until 1879.

The stereotype image of Mark Twain is of the frontier humorist. Before the civil war, the word "stereotype" referred to the process of creating a duplicate printing plate by molding a form of print-ready type with paper mache and then filling the mold with soft metal such as lead. "Cliche" was the noise made when the hot metal filled the cool mold. Mark Twain never fit into a stereotype, and abominated cliches. He did however invest (and lose) over $50,000 in the Kaolotype stereotype process, which used a clay to form the mold. As a writer, Twain wrote as much about his adventures abroad (Innocents Abroad, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the Prince and the Pauper) as he did about the west, and he spent (wasted) as much time managing his investments in technology as he did in writing.

One of Samuel Clemens most substantial investments was in the Paige Typositor. James W. Paige obviously never heard of the principle of Occam’s Razor, which posits that the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best. Paige first worked on mechanically setting type around 1873, and within two years had developed a composing machine. However, it couldn’t justify (spread type across a column), and it couldn’t distribute used type back into its storage cases.

It was difficult to raise capital, as no one believed it possible to automatically justify a line of type, but Clemens, who had spent his youth handcasting type, and his adult career trying to capitalize on his literary creations, understood the incredible potential of a typesetting machine.

Gutenberg had revolutionized printing in the late 1400’s when he developed a system for casting molded moveable metal type. By the nineteenth century, mechanization had started to transform many industries with improvements in looms, the sewing machine, metal fabrication, paper, guns and machine tools. Printing presses had gained speed with improvements such as the Hoe rotary press, but the actual setting of type was still a laborious hand process, where the typesetter would select an individual letter, set it in place, and then, when the piece had been printed, would distribute the letters back to their individual storage places. It was a process that begged for automation.

Clemens, the old printer’s devil, invested his first royalties from Huckleberry Finn in Paige's new machine. Paige set out to create more than a mere machine; he aimed to create a compositor "in the truest sense of the word, as it performs simultaneously all the work of a human compositor." By 1881, Paige had completed a machine which both composed and distributed type, but still without justification. Working with the Pratt & Whitney Company, he was able to automatically justify type by 1887. Clemens loved to watch the machine click and clack and set line upon line, and was heard to exclaim, 'We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, "Where in Hell is the printer's devil, I want more type!" ‘

The Paige patent has been called the most voluminous ever taken out in the history of invention. One patent examiner died while the case was pending, another died insane, and the patent attorney who originally prepared the case also died in an asylum. The noted printer Theodore De Vinne said, when someone compared the Paige compositor to the Jacquard loom: 'True, but the Paige compositor unravels any old fabric, and from it reweaves any new design which the imagination of man can conceive.'

Paige continued to tinker with the machine, and Clemens continued to invest. In all, Clemens invested over $300,000 in the invention. Paige brought it to Chicago in 1892, and it was put in service at the Chicago Herald in 1894, where it worked well. But by then Otto Merganthaler’s Linotype, a simpler machine which cast type from molten lead, had established itself in the field.

I am a compositor-expert, of old and seasoned experience; nineteen years ago I delivered the final-and-for-good verdict that the linotype would never be able to earn its own living nor anyone else’s: it takes fourteen acres of ground now, to accommodate its factories in England.