He referred to his boyhood experiences in the printing office at Hamilton, Ohio. His father published there a Whig newspaper, which finally lost nearly all its subscribers because its publisher had the unhappy genius of always taking the unpopular side of every public question. Howells immortalized this printing office in his essay The Country Printer,—where he recalls “the compositors rhythmically swaying before their cases of type; the pressman flinging himself back on the bar that made the impression, with a swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the forms; and the foreman bending over them.”
The Lucullan banquet referred to outrivaled that given by Colonel Harvey to Mark Twain. How Mark Twain would have loved to be there, and how much the presence of this life-long friend would have meant to Howells! More than four hundred men and women prominent in letters gathered to do honor to the beloved author, and President Taft conveyed to him the gratitude of the nation for the hours of pleasure afforded by his writings.
In the course of his remarks, Howells said:
I knew Hawthorne and Emerson and Walt Whitman; I knew Longfellow and Holmes and Whittier and Lowell; I knew Bryant and Bancroft and Motley; I knew Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; I knew Artemus Ward and Stockton and Mark Twain; I knew Parkman and Fiske.
As I listened to this recapitulation of contact with modern humanists, I wondered what Howells had left to look forward to. No one could fail to envy him his memories, nor could he fail to ask himself what twentieth-century names would be written in place of those the nineteenth century had recorded in the Hall of Fame
My library has taken on a different aspect during all these years. When I first installed my books I looked upon it as a sanctuary, into which I could escape from the world outside. Each book was a magic carpet which, at my bidding, transported me from one country to another, from the present back to centuries gone by, gratifying my slightest whim in response to the mere effort of changing volumes. My library has lost none of that blissful peace as a retreat, but in addition it has become a veritable meeting ground. The authors I have known are always waiting for me there,—to disclose to me through their works far more than they, in all modesty, would have admitted in our personal conferences
CHAPTER VI
Triumphs of Typography
VI