Boy's Toy Main Factor Towards Career When I was eight years old my father took title to a Self-Inker Frinting Press and a font type. The press e- $7.50 and the type $1.10.
wese details, Zor. the receipted bill in my father's file, are of no conceivable interest to nyone else, but to me they are of a degree of concern bordering upon the super-colossal. for that press determined the whole course of my life, writes H. L. Mencken in "Happy Day." Because of it, I got the smell of printer's ink up my nose at a tender age, and it has been swire ling through my sinuses ever since.
On Christmas Day my father undertook to show me how to work it. Inasmuch as he knew no more about printing than Aristotle, and had so little manual dexterity that he could hardly lace a shoe, he made a ghastly mess of it, Before he gave it up as a bad job all the ink had been slathered away and half the type had been broken.
Next mo: T work to scrub the ink cif and make 1 had almost as little skill w. ly h father, was New Year's Dis " succeeded. My cash takings, that Christma. nad been excellent: something on the order of $2. I bought a new can of ink and a font of roman type. caps only. With the press there had come Black Letter and Script, so I now had enough faces to begin printing on a commercial scale. A few days later I was ready with the following announcement: "H. L. Mencken—card printer. 1524 Hollins St., Baltimore, Md."
Up to this time I had always written my name "Henry L." The change to "H. L." was not due to any feeling that the form better became the dignity of a businessman, but simply to the fact that my father had smashed all my Black Letter lower-case r's, and I had to cut my coat to fit my cloth.
So far as I can remember, my father was my only customer. As he set off to the annual de-linum of a Knights Templar convention, I applied for and got the contract for printing his fraternal cartes de visite, which members exchanged when they happened to be thrown together in the saloons of the convention town. My father professed to be delighted with the cards. I charged him 8% cents a dozen, including Masonic emblems put in by hand and hand-coloured.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.