With the publication of my new book, Hot Type, I’m sharing brief excerpts to give you a sense of the stories in it. Mark Twain is the Zelig of the tale, reentering often, as if a tour guide. Here, he comes on stage as Samuel Clemens, a young printer’s devil working in his brother’s Hannibal newspaper before hitting the road as a tramp printer. This is my way to explain the job, the craft — the art, some would say — of setting type. Following this in the book is an account of the tremendous technological innovations in publishing — steam-powered presses, stereotyping, the telegraph — that Sam saw in this period, all of which will lead the way to the Linotype. But you won’t find that here. You’ll have to buy the book .
In 1847, at age eleven, a fatherless Samuel Clemens begged his mother to let him leave school to work. Two years later, after Sam’s teacher decamped Missouri to join the California Gold Rush, Jane Clemens relented and allowed her son to undertake an apprenticeship at Joseph Ament’s Missouri Courier in Hannibal. He worked as a printer’s devil — composing room dogsbody — for no pay, only food, board, education in the trade, and the promise of two suits. Sam slept on the floor of the office above Brittingham’s Drugstore and received just one suit, a too-large handme-down from the too-large publisher, which “gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent.”
After serving two years, Sam went to work in the Hannibal Journal, a paper bought and run by his brother Orion. It was a dreadful weekly blatt filled with endless transcripts of boring speeches, treacly serialized fiction, and random, useless items passing for news: an inch of snow in St. Louis the week before, a robbery a state away in Illinois, how many brooms orphans manufactured daily in Cincinnati (twenty dozen). In Sam Wheeler, Detective, Sam the author described a village paper that might as well have been his brother’s.
It was a wretchedly printed little sheet, being very vague and pale in spots, and in other spots so caked with ink as to be hardly decipherable. The first column was occupied by “Original Poetry” of the sappiest description. The next four were occupied by a selected story which was as sappy as the poetry. The remaining column of this first page was made up of short paragraphs of vapid, heart-breaking, infuriating rot entitled “Wit and Humor.” The other outside page was built wholly of advertisements: three columns consisted mainly of glorified quack-poisons . . . headed with blurred portraits of the assassins who invented the nostrums, and tailed with lying testimonials from people who had never existed; the two remaining columns were thrown into one, which sang the praises of “Bagley’s Celebrated One-Price Emporium” in riotous display-lines of forty-line pica shot full of shouting exclamation points.
The Clemenses were not noted for their business acumen. The boys’ father, John Marshall Clemens, failed at running multiple general stores. As will become clear in these pages, Sam would prove to be a disaster at business, saved from poverty and obscurity only by his talent as a writer and speaker. Brother Orion was the least proficient of the clan. Stumbling into the newspaper business when he worked as a printer in St. Louis, Orion returned to Hannibal to buy the Journal for $500 on credit, and he promptly cut the price of a subscription from $2 to $1 a year and reduced the price for advertising. “Thus,” said Sam, “he created one absolute and unassailable certainty — to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. The paper was a dead failure. It had to be that from the start.”
In the Hannibal Journal, Sam began to write in his rascally voice under the noms de plomb of Rambler and Epaminondas Adrastos Blab, not yet Twain. Once, when Orion was away, young Sam took the opportunity to write and print a news item, illustrated with a childish woodcut, mocking the editor of a rival newspaper, who had purportedly gone to the river to put an end to his lovesick misery. “The satirized editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole Journal office, then he left town and did not come back any more,” reported Twain’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine. Said Sam: “My literature attracted the town’s attention, but not its admiration.”
Mostly, Sam set type, fitting it in page forms, inking it, pressing dampened paper atop it. He was, according to Orion, good at the job, “as swift and as clean as a good journeyman.” Sam stood at the typecase with the text to publish in front of him and a composing stick in his left hand. With the practiced sixth sense compositors acquire, his right hand reached for the correct box from which to pluck the next letter, capitals in the upper case, the rest organized by frequency of use in the lower case — the biggest box for e. Light was supplied by windows in the day, at night by a candle stuck in the d box, dripping its tallow on the k box next to it.
This was not a task for the fumble-fingered. Each metal letter was small, less than an inch long and no thicker than a half-dollar. Sam’s finger felt for a notch molded into one side of a letter’s shaft to make sure it was positioned correctly. Then he added it to his composing stick with a clink. The letters were mirror images of how they would appear in print. As the line filled up, he needed to think ahead and decide whether to split the next word — compositors had to know rules of spelling, hyphenation, punctuation, and grammar. Once that was done, he calculated the spaces, thin or thick, needed between each word to evenly fill out — to justify — the line.
Typesetting, justifying, and correcting all the words in just the paragraph above could have taken an hour of Sam’s labor. Once the type was set, the compositor’s job was still not done, for after the sorts were used in the press and cleaned (in the stench of long-ago composing rooms, that was accomplished with lye and often urine), they had to be redistributed back into their proper nooks in the typecase for reuse. That was not so simple as it sounds, for one had to read each piece of type in mirror image, making sure not to confuse the d and b — minding, as they say, one’s p’s and q’s. At a big-city paper, that paragraph above might have earned Sam twenty-three cents. Orion promised to pay his brother $3.50 a week but “he never was able to pay me a penny as long as I was with him.”
On the press, Sam worked with a colleague. One of them inked the type laid out in a form on the bed of the press. The other placed a dampened sheet of paper in a holder called the tympan, folding down a protective frame called the frisket. He turned a winch called the rounce to move the form and paper under the press’ flat, horizontal platen. Pulling the press’ handle brought the platen down onto the paper and type, transferring ink and text. He then winched the bed back out. The paper came off the type with a kiss, a sticky smack, and they did it all again, as often as 250 times in an hour. The speed of that process determined the natural limit of a newspaper’s circulation: how often the pressmen could pull that lever in the time between the news being set in type and it becoming too stale to sell. The Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge’s Penny Magazine figured in 1833 that the maximum press run for a daily newspaper was 5,000; for a weekly magazine, 20,000. That ceiling on the scale and reach of media was about to explode. And all the skills Sam learned as a journeyman printer would eventually be rendered obsolete by a succession of new inventions….
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