Poor timing and strong competition and mechanical complications are all part of the story of the Compositor's failure and Twain's lost investment, but they're not the whole story. My own sense from research some years ago, when I traced the Paige patents and the competition along with Twain's investments, notebooks, and correspondence, is that he conflated the automation needs of newspapers and fine printers. Human compositors worked for both in quite the same way, but the mediocre quality produced by the Linotype was quite sufficient for products that were going to wrap garbage the next day, while the Paige machine was too expensive for that purpose or to replace human compositors, though it produced excellent copy as well as and faster than the most skilled human competition, according to well-publicized races that the investors set up and publicized. Judith Lee Ohio University