The Sun has christened its new type font
Mencken, in honor of its columnist, editor
and occasional torturer.
Henry Louis Mencken was born 125 years ago on
Sept. 12, 1880, in a little West Lexington Street rowhouse.
He was the son of a cigar-making father
who traded near the stage door of today's
Hippodrome theater.
Mencken was seven years old in 1887 when his
father presented him with a small printing press
and font of type on Christmas morning. Like a
proud parent who wants to demonstrate a
thoughtful gift, he attempted to get the press
going.
"Before he gave it up as a bad job all the ink that
came with the outfit had been had been smeared
or slathered away, and at least half the type had
been plugged with it or broken," Mencken wrote in
his 1936 autobiography, Happy Days 1880-1892.
The printing set was a great hit, and the young
Mencken took an additional $2 in Christmas
money and bought more supplies to print business
cards. He was short on letters (his father had
smashed the lower-case R's on Christmas morning),
and Mencken, who had written his name
Henry L. or Harry, settled on H.L. Mencken. It
stayed for life.
"I had to cut my coat to fit my cloth," he confessed
in his own account of his life.
Mencken remained a connoisseur of fine type
fronts and uncluttered book and newspaper
design. All his many books reflected this passion
for a printed page that was chaste, clean and crisp.
After graduating from the Polytechnic Institute,
Mencken obediently worked in the cigar business
for his father, who died in early 1899. Within a
week, Mencken "invaded" the city room of the old
Baltimore Morning Herald to face down the city editor
and ask for a job.
"What I had heard of city editors made me fear
that, at the least, I'd have to dodge a couple of
paper-weights," he later wrote in an Evening Sun
article.
There were no jobs that day, but Mencken, persistent,
returned daily for two weeks. "Finally I
was sent out on a small assignment -- it was a stable
robbery at Govans -- and a few days later I was
on the staff," he wrote.
From 1899 until a stroke in 1948, Mencken wrote
and became one of this country's best-known
newspaper figures and columnists.
"He was a humorist by instinct and a superb
craftsman by temperament [with] a style flexible,
fancy-free, ribald, and always beautifully lucid: a
native product unlike any other style in the language,"
said commentator Alistair Cooke in his
preface to The Vintage Mencken.
By 1906 the Herald folded and Mencken went to
The Sun as its Sunday editor, became an editorial
writer, and in 1911 started writing his own column,
the Free Lance, which appeared in The
Evening Sun:
"All Baltimoreans may be divided into two classes
-- those who think that the Emerson Tower
[Bromo Seltzer] is beautiful, and those who know
better," he wrote in 1911.
He would become known for an 18-year stretch
of Monday Evening Sun columns written in his signature
style.
"That libido for the ugly which seems to be
instinctive in the American people shows itself
brilliantly in the sidewalks of Baltimore. Forty
years ago they were all of flat paving brick, specially
made for that purpose -- they were all at
least harmonious with the red brick houses of that
time. But the old red bricks are now rapidly giving
way to cement and concrete -- glaring when the
sun shines, slippery when there is any snow, and
hideous all the year 'round," he wrote in a March
1927 column.
He loved covering political conventions. His last
was in 1948, the year his stroke took him out of the
business.
In addition to writing a delightful, three-volume
autobiography, he also made a scholarly study of
words and usage, published as The American
Language.
"It is possible that The American Language will
provide his strongest
claim to immortality.
This work was among the
first to recognize that
language as distinct and
having its own merits. It
is not only a work of
intensive, extensive, and
admirable scholarship, it is writing of sustained
excellence," a Pratt Library tribute said.
Mencken also spent several days a week in New
York, but steadfastly remained a Baltimorean.
Except for his relatively brief marriage, when he
moved to Cathedral Street with a wife who soon
succumbed to spinal tuberculosis, he lived at his
childhood family home on Hollins Street until his
death in 1956.
New York gave Mencken necessary literary and
publishing contacts. He hammered out pithy book
reviews for many publications and was literary
critic of The Smart Set from 1908 until 1914, when
he became the publication's co-editor, with theater
critic George Jean Nathan.
In 1924 he set up his own high-toned monthly
magazine, The American Mercury and ran it for
another decade, all the while visiting The Sun's
office several days a week.
"He was to the first part of the twentieth century
what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth
-- the quintessential voice of American letters,"
said one of his biographers, Terry Teachout
in his 2002 Mencken biography. "Perhaps even a
sage, of sorts, too, though an altogether American
one, not calm and reflective but noisy as a tornado;
witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory,
sometimes maddening, often engaging,
always inimitable.
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H.L. Mencken, pioneer journalist
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