Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/421

 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

forgetful of his humble friends. But now began the series of unfortunate investments that swept away the accumulations of half a lifetime of hard work, and left him loaded with debts incurred by other men. In 1885 he financed the publishing-house of Charles L. Webster & Co. in New York. The firm began business with the prestige of a brilliant coup. It secured the publication of the Memoirs of General Grant, which achieved a sale of more than 600,000 volumes. The first check received by the Grant heirs was for $200,000, and this was followed a few months later by one for $150,000. These are the largest checks ever paid for an author s work on either side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Mr. Clemens was spending great sums on a type setting machine of such seductive ingenuity as to captivate the imagination of everybody who saw it. It worked to perfection, but it was too complicated and expensive for commercial use, and after sinking a fortune in it between 1886 and 1889 Mark Twain had to write off the whole investment as a dead loss.

On top of this the publishing-house, which had been supposed to be doing a profitable business, turned out to have been incapably conducted, and all the money that came into its hands was lost. Mark Twain contributed $65,000 in efforts to save its life, but to no purpose, and, when it finally failed, he found that it had not only absorbed everything he had put in, but had incurred liabilities of $96,000, of which less than one- third was covered by assets.

He could easily have avoided any legal liability for the debts, but as the credit of the company had been

�� �