Frank Bliss was treasurer and secretary of the American Publishing Company (Geer 1875, 295). It is likely that this statement arrived on 11 January, together with the sales statement alluded to in the next letter, and that Clemens sent the present note the same day. Among those who received books from Clemens were: Chandos Fulton (1839–1904), journalist, playwright, novelist, member (like Clemens) of the Lotos Club, and manager of the Park Theatre in New York; Pamela A. Moffett, whose fourteen volumes went to the reading room of the Fredonia chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, as part of an 1874 gift from Clemens (see L6 , 71 n. 3); impresario Phineas T. Barnum; possibly William C. Ralston, founder of the Bank of California; probably George B. Lester, a Hartford business associate of Clemens’s (see L6 , 171–72); Mary F. Foster, who had requested books for an unidentified library (see L6 , 514); political cartoonist Thomas Nast and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, who acknowledged their copies of Sketches, New and Old on 4 and 9 November 1875, respectively (see L6 , 580 n. 1, 587 n. 7); probably Robert Watt, Clemens’s Danish translator (see L6 , passim); James Clemens, Jr., of St. Louis, a wealthy distant cousin (see L1 , 59, 71); Hartford clergymen Joseph H. Twichell, Horace Bushnell, Cyrus F. Knight, and Edwin Pond Parker; Scottish physician and author John Brown; Harper’s columnist William A. Seaver, who had requested a copy of Sketches, New and Old on 2 December 1875 (see L6 , 598–99); and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Nelson H. Chamberlin was a Hartford “carman” (Geer 1875, 46; New York Times: “Theatrical,” 14 Feb 69, 5; “Record of Amusements,” 10 Sept 76, 7; “Death List of a Day: Chandos Fulton,” 12 Jan 1904, 7; Elderkin 1895, “List of Members,” 35, 38).

Clemens added this comment sometime after 11 January, upon receiving the American Publishing Company statement back from Frank Bliss. Bliss presumably sent with it a receipt acknowledging Clemens’s payment of $89.71 as well as Warner’s payment of the note that Clemens had assumed (see L6 , 161). Clemens complained that Bliss had inadvertently left $50 of the latter still to be “extinguished.”