Bindery records show that the first 1,000 copies of the Jumping Frog book were bound (or ordered bound) on 30 April; on 20 May a second batch of 552 copies was bound. Clemens’s contract with Webb was oral, and its terms are therefore uncertain, but it probably specified a 10 percent royalty on the list price of all copies sold, whether in paper covers ($1.00) or cloth ($1.50). No evidence has been found that Webb ever made any royalty payments to Clemens or his mother (ET&S2 , 545 nn. 43–44; advertisement, New York Tribune, 4 May 67, 6).

Clemens could have offered his book manuscript to Dick and Fitzgerald at 18 Ann Street anytime since arriving in New York on 12 January. Dick and Fitzgerald specialized in mail-order sales of inexpensive books for self-instruction and home entertainment, including works of at least two humorists: Benjamin P. Shillaber’s Mrs. Partington’s Carpet-Bag of Fun (1863?) and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood. “Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” published in April 1867, a copy of which the publishers sent Clemens by 23 May (Stern, 101–14; “New Publications,” New York Tribune, 13 Apr 67, 6; SLC 1867). The firm did not publish the Sandwich Islands book, but over the years it reprinted numerous Mark Twain pieces, beginning with his January 1868 speech on “Woman,” printed later that year in Brudder Bones’ Book of Stump Speeches, and Burlesque Orators.