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Monthly Bundle Sample, Campane 194, p.4 
Apparently a part of the agency from the beginning was Octavius A. Dearing whom Read employed as his salesman and who will be a central character in this narrative. Dearing was born in East Buxton, Maine in 1840 and served his apprenticeship in the office of the Biddeford (Maine) Weekly Journal. In 1862 he served for four months in a Maine Volunteer Cavalry unit during the American Civil War. After his discharge he was appointed Biddeford's first city librarian and served until 1864, when he went to Boston, and worked as foreman printer. In 1869 he moved to San Francisco, quickly obtaining employment. From 1870 to 1873 he was variously compositor and job department foreman in two of San Francisco's largest printing offices, A. L. Bancroft & Co. and Cubery & Co. Dearing seems to have been an aggressive, extroverted and innovative individual. In Boston he had devised an improved lead rack and was granted U.S. Patent No. 135,894 on 18 February 1873. In 1888 he was granted a patent on an "All Brass Galley," sold for several years by some of the country's largest printers' suppliers. He was responsible for improvements in typecase stands and a galley corrector's "monitor." The perpetual calendar, each day being cast on a separate body, was claimed as his exclusive invention in 1879, and, most central to this narrative, he played an important role in the introduction of what was later to be known as the California Job Case. By the early 1870s the concern of Messrs. McCorquodale & Co. had become one of the largest printers in Britain. The firm had operations in London, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow and Newton-le-Willows, and in 1879 employed 1773 hands,
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