I got your Ⓐemendation letter in Elmira the other day, & was glad to hear you are getting along so well.
I am glad of the
pictures—the more we have, the better the book will sell. I shall arrive in Hartford
during the last week of this month,
& shall be able to stay two or three weeks.
Had a splendid audience here & a splendid success every way. I believe I could get
engagements for
every night at a hundred dollars, here in the West, as long as I would take them.
It pays them to hire me,
because we are bound to have a good house, whether the weather is good or bad.
When I get to Hartford I will read such proofs as are ready, & will critically revise
the MSS of the
rest, but I don’t much like to entrust even slight alterations to other hands. It
isn’t a judicious thing to do,
exactly. We’ll talk it over when I get there.1explanatory note
Yrs Truly
Samℓ . L. Clemens
letter docketed: ✓ auth and Mark Twain | Feb 14/69 | Author
Textual Commentary
14 February 1869 • To
Elisha Bliss, Jr.
• Ravenna, Ohio • UCCL00251
Source text(s):
MS, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. (PPiU).
Previous Publication:
L3, 98–100.
Provenance:
This letter, presumably kept in the American Publishing Company files after receipt,
was tipped into volume 1 of The Innocents Abroad, the first volume of a special “‘Manuscript’ Set” of the
Autograph Edition of The Writings of Mark Twain published by the American Publishing Company in 1899. Later
sold by a Philadelphia bookseller, Charles Sessler, the set, designated “No. 163”
of a limited issue of 512
copies, was eventually purchased by Mrs. Pitt O. Heasley, who donated it to PPiU.
Clemens was responding to the following letter from Bliss (CU-MARK), who had
had his manuscript since the previous August:
UCLC31661
hartford, conn.,
Feby. 10 186 9.
Sam J. Clemens Esq.
Dear friend, Your favor to Frank recd. I thought as our correspondence has not been
extensive, I would write
you. Hope you are well & fully recovered from the joint attack of that boil & cold. We are
glad to hear of your success West, & of your popularity. (We glean this from the reports of the
press) We presume you have had a very busy trip. Hope you are enjoying yourself now
at Elmira. Now about the Book. Would say, that we have no proofs as yet to send. We are pushing things now very
rapidly however. We are about ready to
begin to electrotype. We are filling it with engravings. We had an artist from N. York here 2 or 3 weeks reading Mss & drawing
sketches. They are now in hands, of engravers, & we receive first batch of them this week when we can
push the electrotyping, rapidly. We think you will be very much pleased with the style in which we
are getting it up We are inserting a copy of enclosed in every book we send out &
are spreading the report of the Book in
all circulars &c &c We anticipate a good sale for it & think we will disappoint
you some in the result, we hope agreeably. There will be about 200
engravings in the Book we think, we have 150 now in ready. We have a lot from Beach
& use some of yours also. We shall hurry
the thing up rapidly as soon as we begin to get engravings, as above.
How long do you propose to be gone to California? And about proofs. It is going to
be very hard to get at you
with them for the next month. Shall you be here before you go? Wh Will it be necessary for you to read the proofs.? What do
you say to our getting a good grammarian & proof reader here to revise, that
is read & correct proofs? With a permission on your part, to cut out a line or an
unimportant
paragraph where needed to make them come out right on pges, we can get along comfortably, as
you will not probably want to alter
the Mss. By giving your permission to this arrangement, we can expedite business,
& be able by time you sale to give you
proofs of a good deal of the Books. We shall set agents at work as soon as we can see through & shall devote all our
energies to its sale. We have never
had a book look better for us, & its author, & we trust you will see that the spring
arrangement, has been a good
one for you. We are spending a good deal of money on it, more than on any book we
ever got out except perhaps Miss, which this will
very much resemble. Should be pleased to have you come up & spend a week or two if,
you can do so. Write again soon
& keep us posted as we very likely shall need to ask you questions, about Mss, frequently,
as we electrotype. Also write at
once if, you accede to our arrangement as to proof reading &c.
All send respects & c
Truly Yours
E Bliss Jr Sy
[enclosure:]
PUBLISHERS’ ANNOUNCEMENT.
Subscribers for “The Great Metropolis” can hardly fail to observe that the volume contains 700 pages instead of 600 as
promised in the
Prospectus. The number of the engravings is also increased. We universally make our
books larger and better than we represent them to
be. We trust this fact will be noticed and add to the public confidence in our future
promises.
We have now in preparation, and shall issue early in the Spring, through our Agents,
“The New Pilgrim’s Progress,”
by “Mark Twain,” the well known “Moralist of the
Main,” and world renowned humorist. We bespeak for it a hearty welcome.
This guileful letter told Clemens just where his book stood in the production process,
even as it avoided saying
that it was several months behind schedule and could not possibly “issue early in
the Spring.” Bliss succeeded
in loosening Clemens’s already shaky grasp of the situation. Even though his contract
of 16 October 1868 specified that
the book was to be typeset and plated, ready for printing, “during the next 4 months”
(within a week of
Bliss’s letter), no proofs were ready because no type had been set, and no type had
been set because (as Bliss
acknowledged) not even the first one hundred fifty illustrations had been electrotyped,
the process that necessarily preceded the
typesetter’s inserting them in the type. The typesetters would not begin until enough of the
electroplated engravings were at hand to allow their work to proceed uninterrupted.
Bliss also tried to minimize at least one source
of possible future delay: the author’s taking seriously his contractual commitment
to “give all neccessary time
& attention to the reading of proofs & correcting the same if necessary.” But Clemens
was more alert to this ploy, at least in part because of his 1867 experience with
the Jumping Frog book, for
which he had allowed Charles Henry Webb not only to read the proof but to make alterations—with
unfortunate results.
Clemens reached Hartford on 5 March, later than expected, and only then did he see
his first proofs (L2, 39–40, 421–22; Hirst, 197–99; Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 12 July 69click to open link, and Francis E. Bliss to SLC, 17 July 69click to open link, both in CU-MARK).
Emendations and Textual Notes
The MS shows a number of inkblots, evidently from ink splattered at the American Publishing
Company after receipt of the letter.
MS, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. (PPiU).
L3 , 98–100.
This letter, presumably kept in the American Publishing Company files after receipt, was tipped into volume 1 of The Innocents Abroad, the first volume of a special “‘Manuscript’ Set” of the Autograph Edition of The Writings of Mark Twain published by the American Publishing Company in 1899. Later sold by a Philadelphia bookseller, Charles Sessler, the set, designated “No. 163” of a limited issue of 512 copies, was eventually purchased by Mrs. Pitt O. Heasley, who donated it to PPiU.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.