Business Difficulties
Over the pleasant-faced man in the bare room with the single chair now hung a trouble common in modern commerce to all who undertake big enterprises with small capital. The printing machinery, bought from Cathrell and moved from the Strand, had been supplemented, but the plant was too small to cope with his quickly growing business. The premises in La Belle Sauvage Yard were cramped and ill-adapted to his purposes, and he was going to pull down and rebuild. He never had any doubt of his ultimate success, and he infected other people with his own belief in himself. Among them were Messrs. Petter and Galpin, a firm of printers, with a place in Playhouse Yard, where their machines were worked by the same "steam power" that printed the Times. The extraordinary progress of the young publishing business had attracted the notice of Galpin, who saw that before long Cassell would not be able to do all his own printing, and called upon him to inquire whether he would place any work with his neighbours. Cassell, it is recorded, walked with Galpin to the archway leading to Ludgate Hill, and, putting a hand on his shoulder, said: "I like you, young man. I will not only give you plenty of printing, but one of these days I will make your fortune." Thereafter they had intimate business relations. Also among the believers in Cassell was Mr. Crompton, a paper manufacturer and part proprietor of the Morning Post, who had given him unlimited credit for paper. Then, suddenly, Crompton was forced by ill-health to call in his accounts and retire from business, and Cassell found himself facing a situation of grave embarrassment. He surmounted it by arranging that Petter and Galpin should take over the Crompton account and purchase the Illustrated Family Paper, and that Messrs. W. Kent and Co., of Paternoster Row, should buy the entire stock and copyright of the "Popular Educator" and of other completed works. This was clearly intended by Cassell to be a merely temporary policy, to extricate him from his most pressing financial difficulties. He retained the editorship of the Illustrated
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