Dun & Company bulletin and I said, "The publishers have mistaken their
public--we want better books, not cheaper." In Eighteen Hundred
Ninety-two, I met William Morris, and after that I was sure I was right.

Again I had gauged the public correctly--the publishers were wrong, as
wrong as the editors. There was a market for the best, and the problem
was to supply it. At first I bound my books in paper covers and simple
boards. Men wrote to me wanting fine bindings. I said, "There is a market
in America for the best--cheap boards, covered with cloth, stamped by
machinery in gaudy tinsel and gilt, are not enough." I discovered that
nearly all the bookbinders were dead. I found five hundred people in a
book-factory in Chicago binding books, but not a bookbinder among them.
They simply fed the books into hoppers and shot them out of chutes, and
said they were bound.

Next the public wanted to know about this thing--"What are you folks
doing out there in that buckwheat town?" Since my twentieth year I have
had one eye on the histrionic stage. I could talk in public a bit, had
made political speeches, given entertainments in crossroads schoolhouses,
made temperance harangues, was always called upon to introduce the
speaker of the evening, and several times had given readings from my own
amusing works for the modest stipend of ten dollars and keep. I would
have taken the lecture platform had it not been nailed down.

In Eighteen Hundred Ninety-eight, my friend Major Pond wanted to book me
on a partnership deal at the Waldorf-Astoria. I didn't want to speak
there--I had been saying unkind things in "The Philistine" about the
Waldorf-Astoria folks. But the Major went ahead and made arrangements. I
expected to be mobbed.