MARK TWAIN AS A PRINTER.

Bruce Herald, Volume XVII, Issue 1757, 11 June 1886, Page 6

MARK TWAIN AS A PRINTER.

RECOLLECTIONS OP EARLY DATS IN A NEWS-PAPEE OFFICE. la response to a toast at a Ben Franklin banquet, Mark Twain said i — All things change in the procession of years, and it may be that I am among strangers. It may be that the printer of today is not the printer ot thirty-

five years ago. I was no stranger to him. I knew him well. I built his fire for him in the winter mornings ; I brought bis water from the village pump ; I swept out his office ; I picked up his type from under his stand ; and, if he was there to see, I put the good type in his case, and the broken ones among the " hell matter ;" and, if he wasn't there to see, I dumped it all with the " pi " on the imposing stone — for that was the furtive fashion of the cub, and I was a cub. I wotted down the paper Saturdays, I turned it Sundays — for this was a country weekly ; I rolled, I washed the rollers, I washed the formes, I folded the papers, I carried them around at dawn Thursday mornings, I enveloped the papers that were for the mail — we had 100 town subscribers and 350 country ones ; the town subscribers paid in groceries and the country one* 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 a puff; and if we forgot it they stopped the paper. Every man on tbe town list helped edit the thing — that is, he gave orders as to how it was to bo 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 invested 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 $2. He used to modify our . politics every way, and he made us change our religion four times in five years. If we ever tried to reason with him, would threaten to stop his ' paper, and, of course, that meant bankruptcy and destruction. That man used to write articles a column and a halt! long, leaded long primer, and sign them ', Junius " or " Veritas " or Vox Populi," or some other highsounding rot ; and then after it was up, he would come in and Bay that ho had changed his mmd — which is a gilded figure of speech, because he hadn't any — and order it to be left ; out. 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. Life was easy with ua ; if we pied a forme we suspended till next week, and we always suspended now and then when the fishing was good, and explained it by the illness of the editor — a palbry excuse, because that kind of a paper was just as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with either of them. He was full of blessed egotism and placid self-importance. He wrote with impressive flatulence and soaring confidence upon the vastest subjects ; but puffing alms, gifta of wedding cake, salty ice-creau, abnormal watermelons, and sweet potatoes the size of your leg, was his best hold. He was always a poet— a poet of the Carrier'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.