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Romance of the Typewriter 173 days, and it is not surprising that the official was able to concern himself with another business. At the time to which I refer the seat of Customs was occupied by Mr. C. Latham Sholes. His auxiliary concern was a printing business, and he was also a typical western editor of the period. For many years he and another good citizen of Milwaukee, Mr. Samuel Soule, had been firm friends. This was not surprising, seeing that Soule was a fellow-crafts- man, who, however, combined farming with print- ing, and who had achieved a certain local reputation for his inventive ability. In the course of their trade these two men bound books—cash books, ledgers, and such-like—for their commercial brothers. But these books were notable for one circumstance. The pages were not numbered, this duty being undertaken by the purchaser with pen or pencil. Sholes and Soule frequently commented upon the shortcomings of this method which led to mistakes and confusion among those men of commerce who lacked method and organisation. One day Sholes happened to mention to Soule that it would be an inestimable boon if the books could be sold with the pages already numbered in printed characters. Cer- tainly this might have been carried out, but it would have entailed setting each number separately for its relative page, while the method would have been so costly that no one would have paid the price for the privilege of buying a book with numbered pages. If it only could be done by a machine ! Sholes’s remarks set Soule thinking. He went home, and within a short time had prepared a rough sketch of a machine with which serial numbering