August 11 Wednesday – In Elmira Sam wrote a longish letter to Edward H. House, who had informed him (not extant) that someone named Rooker had raved about the Tribune’s typesetter (Mergenthaler), that was now used daily in production of that paper. Sam was saving Tribune editorials “day by day” to see how long the type matrices lasted. After restating the case for the Paige machine, he wrote:

It is manifest that the Tribune machine is a most ingenious & capable marvel of mechanism; & so is a racehorse; but he can’t run no competition with a railroad.

About Livy’s estimation of House he wrote:

Why, hang it, man, I’m always trying to undermine Mrs. Clemens’s good opinion of you, but I have grown tired of it at last & given it up. It doesn’t undermine worth a cent. She made some extravagant remark about you last night, & I said “I wish it would ever occur to you to say such a thing about me.” She said, “It would, if you ever deserved it” [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Andrew Chatto, asking what the pay rate was for the “London great dailies” for typesetting per 1000 ems. Sam divulged he was “building a type-setting machine,” which he thought would be done by spring, and added:

This is not the one which is now making such a stir in New York: that one casts each line, in solid type-metal, as it sets it; but mine uses the ordinary movable type. I have been at work at this thing four years, & have spent many shekels on it. And she’s a daisy, I tell you! [MTP].

Sam’s notebook recorded a score of 38 to 38 for C. against T.W. (Clemens vs. Theodore W. Crane). This is listed as perhaps a “popular parlor game during summers at Quarry Farm” [MTNJ 3: 229].

Franklin G. Whitmore wrote that he paid James W. Paige’s salary the day before of $583.33. He conveyed Paige’s “discovery” of the breaking down of the matrices by the typesetting machine at the N.Y. Tribune office, which Whitmore wrote “will prove a costly” machine “for newspaper work” [MTP].