RE: Type-girl

While I cannot provide the name of the "type-girl" Clemens employed, I
did locate more on the subject via "Twain's World" CD-ROM:

     By and by I hired a young woman, and did my first dictating
(letters, merely), and my last until now.  The machine did not do both
capitals and lower case (as now), but only capitals.  Gothic capitals
they were, and sufficiently ugly.  I remember the first letter I
dictated.  It was to Edward Bok, who was a boy then.  I was not
acquainted with him at that time.  His present enterprising spirit is not
new - he had it in that early day.  He was accumulating autographs, and
was not content with mere signatures, he wanted a whole autograph letter.
I furnished it - in type- machine capitals, signature and all.  It was
long; it was a sermon; it contained advice; also reproaches. I said
writing was my trade, my bread- and-butter; I said it was not fair to ask
a man to give away samples of his trade; would he ask the blacksmith for
a horseshoe?  would he ask the doctor for a corpse?

     Now I come to an important matter - as I regard it.  In the year
'74 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine on the
machine.  In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I have claimed that
I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his
house for practical purposes; I will now claim - until dispossessed -
that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to
literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  I
wrote the first half of it in '72, the rest of it in '74.  My machinist
type-copied a book for me in '74, so I concluded it was that one.

     That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects -
devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has
virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character,
so I thought I would give it to Howells.  He was reluctant, for he was
suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains so to
this day.  But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got
him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself.
He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have
never recovered.

     He kept it six months, and then returned it to me.  I gave it
away twice after that, but it wouldn't stay; it came back.  Then I gave
it to our coachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful, because he
did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to make him wiser and
better.  As soon as he got wiser and better he traded it to a heretic for
a side-saddle which he could not use, and there my knowledge of its
history ends.  Copyright ) 1993 Bureau Development, Inc.
The First Writing-Machines

 Title:          The First Writing-Machines
 Author:      Twain, Mark
 Date:           1875

The reference above to Edward Bok set me off.  I tried to hunt down that
first "typed" letter to Bok (who was eleven years old in 1874).  I
thought maybe that letter would include the name of the "type-girl".
I searched Paul Machlis' UCCL (Union Catalog of Clemens Letters) but
the search was not conclusive.  Machlis does not list any letters to
Bok in 1874, but does list three undated letters to Bok; one of
these three might be the one.  Those letters can be found in Bok's
two books, _The Americanization of Edward Bok_ (1920) and _Twice Thirty_
(1924).  Maybe someone else can locate these books to see if either of
them includes a typed letter from SLC to Bok, aged eleven.

Meanwhile, I did locate what has to be very nearly, if not the first
"typed" SLC letter, again on the "Twain's World" CD-ROM:

        Hartford, Dec. 9, 1874.

     My Dear Howells, - I want to add a short paragraph to article No. 1,
when the proof comes.  Merely a line or two, however.

     I don't know whether I am going to make this typewriting machine go
or not,: that last word was intended for n-not; but I guess I shall make
some
sort of a succss of it before I run it very long.  I am so thick-fingered
that I miss the keys.

     You neednt a swer this; I am only practicing to get three; another
slip-up there; only practici?ng to get the hang of the thing.  I notice I
miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters and punctuation marks. I
am simply using you for a target to bang at.  Blame my cats but this thing
requires genius in order to work it just right.

          Yours ever,           (M)ark.

Paul Berkowitz