January 05, 2011

Mark Twain on James W. Paige

Here's a passage from The Autobiography of Mark Twain on the topic of James W. Paige, inventor of a typesetting machine that Clemens invested in.
I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and petrified heart; of colossal vanity and- But here the opposites stop.

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