How Not to Get Rich

by Alan Pell Crawford

  Over the next year, Twain continued to invest even more sums in Slote and Sneider, all the while imagining still more applications for their process, “for wall-paper stamps, stamps for calico-printing, & stamps for embossed work on leather,” he told Orion. Over time, however, Twain’s confidence in Slote and Sneider, if not in the Kaolotype itself, began to give way to doubts. Slote wasn’t the efficient manager that Twain had wanted, and in January 1881, Twain ordered Slote not to bother him with picayune decisions. “I started in to be a Figure-Head President & that’s what I am.”

  More and more uneasy, Twain made an appointment to see for himself what his associates were up to. But there was a complication. The night before he was to visit the Fulton Street head­quarters, it burned down. So he made another appointment, this time to visit Sneider’s own workshop. It too burned down.

  One such fire was plausible. Two raised serious suspicions. Slote, meanwhile, was either unable to produce receipts for expenditures or simply refused to. To get to the bottom of things, Twain called in Charles Webster from Fredonia, New York, a village near Lake Erie. Webster was a twenty-two-year-old nephew by marriage “who seemed a capable and energetic young fellow.” Webster was selling insurance in Fredonia when summoned to take over the Kaolotype business and various related ventures. In April 1881, Twain gave Webster complete authority over the day-to-day operations but also “started in at once to unload instructions, plans, and bright ideas onto his new helper.” Within a week of Webster’s involvement, he had looked at the company’s books (such as they were), made inquiries, and turned up enough damaging information that Twain was ready not only to have Sneider fired, but arrested.

  The samples Sneider claimed to have produced on the ­Kaolotype Engraving Company payroll, Webster discovered, had been produced before Twain had hired him. The contract with Sneider “was based on a lie & a fraud,” Twain concluded. The $5,000 and the $150 a month salary, he told Webster,

  were to be paid for simply the two things—the delivery to us of patents, & the development & perfecting of a process already shown to have been accomplished. But it was all a lie, for Sneider had invented nothing new; he was working by old methods—& at the same time not succeeding with them. He pretended that the specimens he brought were made by the process described in the patents afterward issued to him, but such was not the case. It was exactly as if he had contracted to furnish me a process of making silver out of sawdust for a specific sum, & then claimed the sum on specimens of silver produced in the regular old time-honored way.

  Twain wanted Sneider brought to justice “on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses,” and he wanted Slote to bear half the costs of bringing the charges. Slote, if anything, should “bear a larger proportion than that, because if he had stood to his part of the agreement & run the business himself, instead of taking Sneider’s word for everything, the transparent swindle would have been detected long ago & the outlay stopped.” Slote need not worry that they wouldn’t prevail in court, because “the case is perfectly plain, & the penitentiary is perfectly sure.”

  But by now, Twain had grown as distrustful of Slote as he was of Sneider. Slote was still in charge of marketing the scrapbook, and here too he was falling short of the mark. Twain was being paid around $1,800 a year from scrapbook sales when he thought “it ought to have been 3 times as much.” Slote, he decided, “took advantage of my utter confidence in his honesty to cheat me.” Slote “knew he was lying . . . and also knew I was ass enough to believe him.”

  Webster pressed on with his investigations, and Twain offered suggestions. Twain wanted Webster to corner Sneider, then turn on Slote. But to build the case against Sneider, it might help to hint to Slote that he could “be proceeded against as a party to the swindle.” Under pressure, Sneider cracked. “The bubble has burst,” Webster told Twain in May 1881. Sneider “confessed [that] the whole thing was a swindle from the beginning,” and was now threatening to kill himself. It’s not clear whatever happened to Sneider, but there’s no evidence that he was ever arrested or committed suicide. Slote died in February 1882. Publishers’Weekly, which ran an obituary, mentions no cause of death.

  Had Slote died a year earlier, Twain said, “I should have been at the funeral, and squandered many tears; but as it is, I did not go and saved my tears.” Under the protection of their friendship, Slote “stole from me for at least seven years . . . I came very near sending him to the penitentiary.”

  In one last effort to save the Kaolotype engraving process, Twain suggested that it be used for the images in Life on the Mississippi, published in May 1883. Wanting nothing to do with Sneider’s so-called technological miracle, the illustrators refused. In his autobiography, Twain viewed the episode with rueful equanimity. He figured that with Slote in charge, he spent $500 a month just to keep the company going with nothing to show for it. “That raven flew out of the Ark regularly every thirty days,” Twain wrote, “but it never got back with anything and the dove didn’t report for duty.” Webster was honest but, he decided, no more successful. He “continued to send the raven out monthly, with the same old result to a penny.”

  All told, Twain figured he lost $42,000 on the venture—or roughly $953,000 today—and eventually gave the patent away “to a man whom I long detested and whose family I desired to ruin. Then I looked around for other adventures.” Twain was never at a loss for ideas, so Webster need not fret; Twain would include him in these adventures. There would be plenty for Webster to do, and his record to date was commendable.

  Webster had even managed to wring some value out of the property in Tennessee. “I have some good news to tell you,” Pamela wrote to Orion and his wife in May 1881. “Charley has sold the very last acre of Tennessee land. Is that not something to rejoice over?” Sold might be putting it too strongly. Pamela said he traded whatever was left of the land for a lot in St. Paul, Minnesota. Webster himself didn’t know for sure if any acreage remained. No one did. But the family was eager to believe they had finally gotten some value from whatever was left of it. Twain, who had come to dread any mention of “that hated property,” refused to talk about it.

  But Pamela was jubilant. The lot in St. Paul, she reported, had been assessed in 1880 for $800 or $850, and in 1881 for $1,050. So what if Webster sold the land when its value was increasing? They were rid of it at last. A city lot might not have been much, but it was something.

  14

  |—

  —|

  “The Proportions of My Prosperity”

  Twain thought so well of Charley Webster’s work he made him his business manager. This position entailed new responsibilities, not all of which would have been found in anyone’s job description. Once, for example, Twain was convinced that the New York Tribune had a vendetta against him and was printing daily “insults, for two months on a stretch,” and instructed Webster to scour the newspaper’s files and send him copies of these affronts. Webster found nothing but a less-than-favorable review of The Prince and the Pauper.

  Even Livy found chores for her husband’s business manager. On more than one occasion she asked Webster to go to Burghart’s furniture store in Manhattan to look at pieces she had chosen for the Hartford house. Eager to please, he would hustle back and forth to the store with a measuring stick to check on the dimensions of a dresser, and then, if it suited, approve the purchase and get it to Hartford by Christmas. After pestering him with one set of detailed instructions, she asked, with a trace of condescension, “Charley, do you understand all this?”

  Webster did understand, evidently, for Twain soon gave him a promotion. In early 1884, dissatisfied with all of the other well-established publishers, Twain formed his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Company, Publishers, installing his nephew Charley as its titular head, chief sales agent, and office manager, with headquarters on the second floor of a building on Fulton Street in Manhattan. Twain’s previous publishers, he decided, had fleeced him. He recalled his relationship with
Elisha Bliss’s American Publishing Company, which published The Innocents Abroad and other titles, as “ten years of swindlings.” Bliss, he said, was a “skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed, rat-eyed professional liar and scoundrel [who] never did an honest thing in his life, when he had a chance to do a dishonest one.” When Bliss died in 1880, Twain signed on with James R. Osgood and Company, which published The Prince and the Pauper in December 1881 and Life on the Mississippi in May 1883. Osgood, unlike Bliss, was “one of the dearest and sweetest human beings to be found on the planet anywhere.” Unfortunately, Osgood knew “nothing about subscription publishing” and “made a mighty botch of it.”

  With Webster handling the day-to-day responsibilities (meaning when he was not running back and forth to measure dresser drawers at Burghart’s), Twain thought he could do better, not only with publishing his own books, but with publishing those of other authors as well. By eliminating the middle man, Twain figured he could pocket the profits himself. Of course he would have to share earnings with Webster, which would require some negotiation. Twain was never completely convinced he should have been on salary at all. Webster was only learning his trade, after all, and Twain seems to have regarded him as a proto-intern. Brick masons weren’t on salary when they were apprentices. Not even doctors and lawyers were salaried as apprentices. Twain wasn’t salaried when he was a cub pilot on the Mississippi. He paid $500 to learn the river, and he had borrowed the down payment. A young man studying for the ministry told Twain that “even Noah got no salary for the first six months—partly on account of the weather and partly because he was learning navigation.”

  But then Twain looked at the situation in a different light. Maybe the very fact that Webster had dared to demand a salary said something about his unique gifts. With this possibility in mind, Twain decided that he had encountered in Webster “something entirely new to history.” As such, he should not allow some other employer to snatch him up. Any young man

  starting life in New York without equipment of any kind, without proved value of any kind, without prospective value of any kind, yet able without blinking an eye to propose to learn a trade at another man’s expense and charge for this benefaction an annual sum greater than any president of the United States had ever been able to save out of his pay for running the most difficult country on the planet, after Ireland, must surely be worth securing—and instantly—lest he get away.

  So they came to terms. Webster was to receive $2,500 a year as well as a third of the first $20,000 of net profits, with a tenth of anything more than that. Twain would have to approve business expenses above $1,000, and, as Ron Powers puts it, he retained the right “to complain about the rest.” And Twain did a good deal of complaining.

  The first book scheduled for release by Charles L. Webster & Company was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain had been “fooling around” with the manuscript since at least 1876. In the summer of 1883, Twain retreated to Quarry Farm, where he hoped to finish it in just two months, but he kept getting distracted and his writing was forever being relegated to the back burner. By now, Webster knew all too well Twain’s tendency to get derailed. The Kaolotype was hardly the only one of the side hustles that got in the way of Twain’s work as a writer and publisher. There were, of course, his own inventions. “No one seems to have appreciated the fact that Mark Twain was an inventive genius. Except Mark Twain.” That’s how Samuel Webster, Charles Webster’s son, put it in his book Mark Twain, Business Man, a spirited defense of his father’s reputation against Twain’s late-life attacks. Samuel Webster described the inventions as projects that Twain considered “greater than literature.”

  There was, for example, Mark Twain’s Fact and Date Game, which, Samuel Webster said, “swept [Twain] off his feet.” This was a board game that awarded points for a child’s ability to recall events in English history, improving the player’s memory in the process. Twain compiled extensive notes for the game and hired brother Orion to look up the names and dates to be used in it. During this period, the two brothers and both their households “thought of nothing else. Huckleberry Finn was quite forgotten.”

  But developing the game proved more difficult than Twain expected. He spent parts of more than twelve years trying to perfect it, more time than it took to write Huckleberry Finn. “If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don’t,” he told Howells. “I’ve got the thing at last so it will work, I guess, but I don’t want any more tasks of that kind.” At one point, Twain thought he had gotten the job done. In fact, he was only “entering the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn’t be an easy job, or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago.”

  By August 1883, Twain felt the concept of the game was near enough to perfection to direct Webster to secure patents in the United States, Canada, and England. Meanwhile, Twain threw himself into the details of the game’s construction—the design, for example, of cribbage-like game boards with pinholes punched in them and cloth inserted between the boards. “I think that several thicknesses of the commonest, coarsest, cheapest loose-woven blanketing or similar goods will answer our purpose quite well, when packed together pretty tightly between the boards—especially if we increase the depth a mere trifle, so as to give the pin a little deeper hold,” he told Webster. “I don’t believe an increased depth will be necessary, but we can do it if necessary.” The following summer, “as soon as Huck Finn is published, you will go to work & publish one or two of the historical games—so be governed accordingly. There’s bushels of dividends in those games.”

  But there weren’t bushels or even brandy snifters of money in them. The game wasn’t on the market until 1891, and the few stores to sell it did so only on consignment. People who tried to play the game found it too complicated even for adults—and much too tedious to be fun. One said it “looked like a cross between an income tax form and a table of logarithms.” Considering the game’s frigid reception, Twain told one of his office workers to “put it aside until some indefinite time in the far future—it isn’t worth [the] trouble, now, when you can employ your time more profitably on other things. Besides, I am sorry I put my name to the Game; I wish I hadn’t.”

  ANOTHER DISTRACTION WAS the baby-bed clamp. The third of Twain’s daughters, Jean Clemens, was born in 1880, so he was by now familiar with the tendency of infants to kick the sheets and covers off their beds and, supposedly, catch a cold as a result. This might not have caused much concern for most parents, but Twain evidently thought something should be done about it, and he was just the one to do it.

  Twain envisioned a kind of clasp that would secure the bed sheets. But he then discovered in 1884 that a comparable device had already been patented and was being manufactured and marketed. So he bought out the company’s interest in its product with the intention of substituting his own invention, which he felt was superior, anyway. He would also improve upon the other company’s pricing, which he considered too cheap. This rival was selling its device for 90 cents when Twain thought it should be priced at $1.15.

  With evident pride, Twain told Webster he had “invented a more expensive & more convenient one,” thereby turning marketing wisdom on its head. Instead of undercutting the competition by offering a comparable product at a lower price, he would in fact charge more. By early 1885 he decided that at $1.15 the device was underpriced. “Even $2 is much too low for the bed-clamp,” he said. “If I go into it eventually, it must be at $2.25 each for the small size, & $3 for the large.”

  Webster held his tongue only so long. After meeting with a possible manufacturer of the device, he sent along cost estimates and a recommendation. “You haven’t asked my opinion,” Webster said, “but I will say, I have no doubt that it will prove a failure. It is so entirely foreign to our business that I think it is unwise to go into it.” He had “already heard of one case where it has been bought and paid for and thrown away as useless.” Twain’s response was to challenge
the cost estimates. These figures, he thought, made no sense—at least to someone who didn’t want to accept their implications.

  “Try again,” Twain said. “Tabulate the expenses of all kinds, in an intelligible way. And state some idea of what the entire expense will be, in dollars & cents; for ‘& expenses’ means nothing.” To comply with this request, Webster asked for more information. Twain refused. “No, it is business—so I don’t want anything to do with it. You are there to take care of my business, not to make business for me to take care of.”

  Gradually Twain lost confidence in the commercial feasibility of the bed clamp, though as late as 1888, Webster was still afraid Twain might try to revive the idea. Samuel Webster also had firsthand experience with the baby-bed clamp. When he was an infant, his mother—Twain’s niece—tested it on him. “I was used as the guinea pig for one of [Twain’s] greatest inventions—a bed clamp to keep children from kicking off the covers,” Webster writes. “But it didn’t work so well in my case. There was nothing wrong with the bed-clamp—it was either the baby or the way it was hitched on. He probably suggested to my mother to get another baby.”

  Another salvo: “I might have an early prejudice against that bed-clamp, but I can’t see the average young parent paying three dollars for it, even with [Twain’s] improvements. Safety pins are much better and wouldn’t tear the sheets any worse. Any fairly intelligent parent could have made one out of nearly anything.” But Twain “had probably figured out how many babies were born every year and put down each one at $3 for his bed-clamp—or $2.25 at the lowest—and was getting rich off it. Why didn’t he go into the chicken business?”