Chapter 5 - The Double Failure of Mark Twain

Summary

Perhaps the most famous financial failure in American literary history was that of Mark Twain in the mid-1890s. The economy in tatters following the Panic of 1893, Twain’s publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., went belly-up owing to the national decline of the subscription method of publication by which Twain had made his money. Making matters worse, Twain had invested extensively through the early 1890s in James W. Paige’s experimental typesetting machine (Figure 5.1), which promised to revolutionize the printing trade by automatically setting moveable type, hence replacing the costly human labor that had conducted the complex operation. By 1894 it became clear that the Paige compositor was too complicated and delicate for commercial operation, and would be beaten to the market by a more practical linotype machine. Type began to break in Paige’s compositor; with 18,000 parts, its sequential operations easily got out of whack. Reflecting on this failed “machine episode” in his autobiography, Twain related the faults of the machine to a problem in the character of its inventor. Paige seemed to be a mechanical genius and savvy businessman, yet he was flawed by what Twain called “commercial insanity.” His doubleness, or failed integrity of character, led Twain to an appropriately duplicitous response: “Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.” Twain had himself been disastrously trapped by the unreliable Paige. The failure of the machine to read type met Twain’s failure to read the character of its inventor in this Gilded Age drama of lost fortunes.