Mark Twain Speaking

59. The Compositor

200 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 59 · Mark Twain, aformerjourprinter, was in congenial company with members of the Typothetae, an association ofmaster printers who celebrated annually on the birthday ofBenjamin Franklin, patron ofallprinters. On one such occasion, at Keokuk, Iowa, in 1856, young Sam Clemens made hisfirst speech. At the 1886 dinner in New York, the organization honored its distinguished forebear by displaying an oil portrait ofFranklin and a model, in sugar, ofthe Franklin hand press. Of two speeches Mark Twain prepared for the Typothetae, he delivered "The Compositor," but the rejected, untitled version is also given below. The Compositor Typothetae Dinner, Delmonico's, New York, January 18, 1886 I am staggered by the compliments which have been lavished and poured out on me by my friend on my right. I am as proud of this compliment as I am staggered. It is uncommon in my experience. It is the first time that anybody in my experience has stood up in the presence of a large and respectable assemblage of gentlemen like this, and confessed that I have told the truth once. If I could return the compliment I would do it. The chairman's historical reminiscences of Gutenberg have caused me to fall into reminiscences, for I myself am something of an antiquity. All things change in the procession of the years, and it may be that I am among strangers. It may be that the printer of today is not the printer of thirty-five years ago. I was no stranger to him. I knew him well. I built his fire for him in the cold winter mornings; I brought his 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 ifhe 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 wetted down the paper Saturdays, I turned it Sundays-for this was a country weekly; I rolled, I washed the rollers, I washed the forms, I folded the papers, I carried them around at dawn Thursday morn- MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 201 ings. The carrier was then an object of interest to all the dogs in town. If I had saved up all the bites I ever received, I could keep M. Pasteur busy for a year. I enveloped the papers that were for the mail-we had a hundred town subscribers and three hundred and fifty country ones; the town subscribers paid in 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 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 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 a 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 a column and a ·half long, leaded 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 order 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 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 a barbecue, or a circus...