kbinders were dead. I found five hundred people in a
book-factory in Chicago binding books, but not a bookbinder among them.
They simply fed the books into hoppers and shot them out of chutes, and
said they were bound.

Next the public wanted to know about this thing--"What are you folks
doing out there in that buckwheat town?" Since my twentieth year I have
had one eye on the histrionic stage. I could talk in public a bit, had
made political speeches, given entertainments in crossroads schoolhouses,
made temperance harangues, was always called upon to introduce the
speaker of the evening, and several times had given readings from my own
amusing works for the modest stipend of ten dollars and keep. I would
have taken the lecture platform had it not been nailed down.

In Eighteen Hundred Ninety-eight, my friend Major Pond wanted to book me
on a partnership deal at the Waldorf-Astoria. I didn't want to speak
there--I had been saying unkind things in "The Philistine" about the
Waldorf-Astoria folks. But the Major went ahead and made arrangements. I
expected to be mobbed.

But Mr. Boldt, the manager of the hotel, had placed a suite of rooms at
my disposal without money and without price. He treated me most
cordially; never referred to the outrageous things I had said about his
tavern; assured me that he enjoyed my writings, and told me of the
pleasure he had in welcoming me.

Thus did he heap hot cinders upon my occiput. The Astor gallery seats
eight hundred people. Major Pond had packed in nine hundred at one dollar
each--three hundred were turned away. After the lecture the Major awaited
me in the anteroom, fell on my neck and rained Pond's Extract down my
back, crying: "Oh! Oh! Oh! Why didn't we charge them two dollars apiece!"

The next move was to make a tour of the principal cities under Major
Pond's management. Neither of us lost money--the Major surely did not.

Last season I gave eighty-one lectures, with a net profit to myself of a
little over ten thousand dollars. I spoke at Tremont Temple in Boston, to
twenty-two hundred people; at Carnegie Hall, New York; at Central Music
Hall, Chicago. I spoke to all the house would hold; at Chautauqua, my
audience was five thousand people. It will be noted by the Discerning
that my lectures have been of double importance, in that they have given
an income and at the same time advertised the Roycroft Wares.

The success of the Roycroft Shop has not been brought about by