October 16 Wednesday –Hartford. Sam, laid up in bed, wrote again to Frank Fuller. After a paragraph about his old tendency to speculate and his eventual lack of interest in it, Sam talked about his health.
If you are talking about colds in the head, it is not with them that I have trouble — I banish them easily & swiftly; but it’s the aftermath that beats me — the trouble in the chest that is heir & successor to the exiled headcold. That is the fellow that stays by me a week, & is not cast out save by prayer. … / Between you & me, Franklin, it’s dull here in bed, there’s no question about it [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Karl Gerhardt, answering his Oct. 7 offer to buy royalties on the Paige typesetter. Things were looking up, Sam wrote, and thanked Gerhardt for his offer.
Yesterday, our first apprentice, after less than 5 working weeks apprenticeship doubled the machine’s original price by setting (during 20 minutes) at the rate of 8,550 ems an hour.
A month ago I couldn’t have raised a dollar on the machine. But now a single individual in New York wants to put up the several millions of capital required.
Those are two of the month’s developments, & they say, “Go slow — you don’t know anything about this machine yet — it is too early to enter upon permanent plans.”
Another development — of yesterday. The N.Y. Herald writes to claim first place in the list of orders for machines.
You can buy those royalties on the terms I offered you whenever it is convenient between this & January. / I was very busy; & now am sick abed, or I would have answered sooner [MTP].
Sam also sent a letter and invitation to Charles H. Taylor for Boston Globe, letter not extant but referred to in Taylor’s Oct. 17 response. The invitation was extended also to Oliver Wendell Holmes [MTP].
L.J. Drake wrote from Brighton N.Y. pointing to page 536 in the October Drake’s Magazine about an article for a “perpetual calendar.” Sam wrote on the envelope,
Brer W. say “I remember it now, but had long ago forgotten it. I never manufactured it because matters of greater moment intruded and obliterated my interest in it; in fact, swept it wholly out of my memory” SLC [MTP].
Frederick J. Hall wrote to Sam:
Your favor received. Since you approve of it, we will take sixteen of Beard’s best pictures and make a solid signature of pictures; under each one, in fine type, putting a short description of whatever the picture is intended to represent, as this will be a help to agents in selling the book. In selecting these pictures we have left out anything that would apply directly to the church or that is strongly political, and the idea of a government by an aristocratic class, we have put in, as that will suit the American public well.
Hall had learned through Hamilton W. Maybee that James R. Osgood had gone to Hartford to inspect the typesetter; Hall presumed Osgood would be the man who Harper’s would work through in England to “get hold of Stanley’s book.” He proposed a book by Dr. Thomas De Witt Talmage that he thought would sell. Daniel Carter Beard had just stopped in [MTP]. For Talmage references, see Gribben 685.