Robert Louis Stevenson

“ The printing-press was there, and business was resumed with enthusiasm. The stepfather, who had made much more progress with engraving than the boy had with Latin, had the blocks and poems all ready for ‘The Graver and the Pen.’
But the printing-press broke down; and p. xviiafter an interval of despair and unavailing attempts to repair it, an amiable old man was found who had a press of his own behind a microscopic general shop. Here ‘The Graver and the Pen’ was printed with what now seems an almost regrettable perfection. The amiable old man was altogether too amiable. ”

“ Louis, as the little boy always called his stepfather, with a familiarity that was p. xmuch criticised by strangers, followed this publishing venture with absorbing interest. Then his own ambitions awakened, and one day, with an affected humility that was most embarrassing, he called at the office, and submitted a manuscript called, ‘Not I, and Other Poems,’ which the firm of Osbourne and Co. gladly accepted on the spot. It was an instantaneous hit, selling out an entire edition of fifty copies. ”

“ The next day the little boy was sent to a dying Swiss—half the population of Davos were coughing away the remnants of life—who lived with his poverty-stricken family in one room, earning their bread by carving bears. ”

“ The little boy’s ambitions soared. He wrote and printed a tiny book of eight p. ixpages, entitled ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West,’ in which he used all the ‘cuts’ he had somehow accumulated with his type—the story conforming to the illustrations instead of the more common-place way of the illustrations conforming to the text. This work can occasionally be picked up at one of Sotheby’s auctions, and if you can get it for less than twenty-five pounds you are lucky—that is if you are a collector and prize such things. It has risen to the dignity of ‘Davos Booklets ”

“ Nor with his toy theatre and printing-press was the indoor confinement ever irksome. He but dimly appreciated that his stepfather and mother were less happy in so favoured a spot. His mother’s face was often anxious; sometimes he would find her crying. His stepfather, whom he idolised, was terribly thin, and even to childish eyes looked frail and spectral. The stepfather was an unsuccessful author named Robert Louis Stevenson, who would never have got along at all had it not been for his rich parents in Edinburgh. ”

“ In the ensuing enthusiasm another book was planned, and the first poem for it written.
‘If only we could have illustrations,’ said the publisher longingly. But his ‘cuts’ had all been used in ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West.’ Illustrations had to be p. xiput by as a dream impossible of fulfilment. No, not impossible! Louis, who was a man of infinite resourcefulness (he could paint better theatre-scenes than any one could buy) , said that he would try to carve some pictures on squares of fretwood. The word fretwood seems as unknown nowadays as the thing itself ”

“ A gentleman with a black beard, who was in charge of these arrangements, willingly offered to pay two francs fifty centimes for each set of programmes. The little boy was afraid of the gentleman p. viiiwith the black beard; he was a formidable gentleman, with a formidable manner, and he was very exacting about spelling. The gentleman with the black beard attached an inordinate importance to spelling. The gentleman with the black beard was wholly unable to make allowances for the trifling mistakes that will occur in even the best-managed of printing-offices. ”

“ It was with consternation that he once heard his stepfather say in a voice of tragedy: ‘Good Heavens, Fanny, we are spending ten pounds a week on food alone!’
The little boy, under the stress of this financial urgency, decided to go into business, finding a capital opening in the Hotel Belvidere, where a hundred programmes were required weekly for the Saturday night concerts. ”

“ Perhaps it was the tone it was uttered in; perhaps the looks of discouragement and depression that went with it.
‘Fanny, I shall have to write to my father.’
It served to make the little boy very p. viiprecocious about money. In a family perennially short of it he learned its essentialness early. He knew too, that he was a dreadfully expensive child. His stepfather paid forty pounds for his winter’s tutoring, not to speak of an additional outlay on a dying Prussian officer who taught him German with the aid of a pocket-knife stuck down his throat to give him the right accent. ”

“ I would have the reader see a little boy living in a châlet on a Swiss mountain-side, overlooking a straggling village named Davos-Platz, where consumptives coming to get well more often died. It was winter ”