Another boy, who had never had to bother his head with school-books, but
who had also learned to read, in due time got started on a new interest
by a printing-press, which was given to him for Christmas. He puzzled
with it and worked over it, until he learned to set up type and operate
it very nicely. Then he began printing visiting cards--first for
himself, then mother and father, then the servants and friends. It was
great fun to take orders from them and charge them ten cents a dozen,
in a business-like way. Next he got a larger press and different kinds
of type, and by dint of perseverance he found among the trades-people a
few kindly souls, who allowed him to print their business cards for them
at so much a hundred.
Out of this interest grew a more ambitious one. How fine it would be to
print and publish a little newspaper, with stories and verses and
advertisements and subscriptions and everything! This appealed to the
imagination and became an absorbing ambition. In this particular case,
the newspaper project soon outdistanced the printing press. The
newspaper must be bigger and finer than a press of that kind could
possibly manage. So the boy went to a regular printer and found out
about the cost and details of publishing such a paper as he had in mind.
He didn't have enough money of his own for that, but he figured out that
by going again to the tradespeople and getting them to pay for
advertising in his paper and by making people pay for subscriptions to
the paper, the problem could be solved. He decided to limit the scope of
his enterprise to the publication of six numbers, one every month. He
went to different tradespeople with whom the family dealt, stated his
intentions, and asked for advertisements at the rate of fifty cents a
number. He was only twelve years old at the time and they naturally had
doubts about his ability to carry out the project; but some were found
with enough kindly sympathy to agree to pay him, when he brought them
the paper containing the advertisement. In the same way, among relatives
and friends and neighbors, he sought subscriptions at the rate of five
cents a copy and succeeded in obtaining a sufficient number for his
purpose.
He chose a name for his paper by himself but, when it came to the
question of the reading matter, he did not presume to attempt much of
that, at first, but felt he could do better by appealing to his mother
and aunt and others for the kind of contributions he had in mind.
He carried out his project, to the letter,--six numbers, one a
month--and at the end of it, he not only had the satisfaction of a fine
effort well done, but he had also earned a clear profit of over fifteen
dollars. Likewise, he had helped the growth of character, the taste for
literary achievement, the acquisition of much useful experience and
information, and considerable mental training of an admirable sort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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