7 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00350)
I was away from town when the Tribune notice of the book arrived, & I have had a time of it, since, to get hold of it—but I have succeeded. I am ever so much obliged to you for that notice, & I confess that I felt a deal relieved when I read it, for I was afraid from the start that I might “catch it” disagreeably & caustically in the t Tribune, & yet I would not & could not write seriously and try to get you to be a traitor to your own judgment & say kind things of the volume when you if you couldn’t feel them, though the publisher thought that would be a proper enough thing to do.1explanatory note I didn’t mind asking you to touch up those Memphis pavement-sharps,2explanatory note because I was able to swear to the right & wrong of that matter, but I it was different with the book. I am very much obliged, & I will reciprocate if I ever get a chance. The book is selling furiously, & the publisher says he is driving ahead night & day trying to keep up. Certainly & surely the it is n’t every adventurer’s maiden experiment that fares so kindly at the hands of the press as mine has, & so if it don’t sell sell a prodigious edition, after all the compliments & the publicity it has received, it will the fault will lie elsewhere than with the press.3explanatory note
Thank you for the invitation—& I shall be glad to have my headquarters at the Tribune, which is the only on officeⒶemendation I have been much acquainted & at home in., there.4explanatory note I could not get rid of some few of my lectures at engagements at all, & so now I am trying to get back those I canceled & enough more to employ me in the east for about two months—& that just puts my marriage off indefinitely—which is about the first of Feb. no doubt. I’ll not talk in the west at all if I can help it. I would give nearly anything to get clear out of talking at all this winter.
When you happen to be at Buffalo or Elmira, you must come & see me—half of me is at Mr. Langdon’s in Elmira, you know, & so I am really writing of over a fraudulent & assumed name when I sign myself Twain. No—that is wrong—I mean I am not writing over, &c &c. Wishing you all comfort, peace & prosperity—I am—
Clemens had requested a sympathetic review of The Innocents Abroad in his letter of 15 August to Reid. The New York Tribune’s evenhanded review, which included liberal extracts from the book, appeared on Friday, 27 August, the day Clemens left Buffalo for a weekend in Elmira:
Mark Twain, as the readers of The Tribune at any rate must remember, was one of the confiding band who in 1867 sailed from New-York in the Quaker City on a sort of wholesale Sunday-school excursion round the world. They were to go everywhere and see everything, and have no great trouble about it either, for their leader decided what they ought to see and showed them just how to see it. ... Mark Twain occasionally during the voyage contributed to The Tribune his impressions of foreign lands and people, and a narrative of some of the incidents of the trip. Here, however, we have a complete history of the voyage, copiously illustrated. Mr. Clemens has an abominable irreverence for traditions and authority,—which sometimes unfortunately degenerates into an offensive irreverence for things which other men hold sacred,—and makes not the slightest hesitation at expressing his opinions in the very plainest possible language, no matter how unorthodox they may be. There is nothing which he fears to laugh at, and though some people may wish that he had been a little more tender of the romance of travel, it is certainly refreshing to find a tourist who does not care what other tourists have said before him. The greater part of his book is pure fun, and considering how much of it there is, the freshness is wonderfully well sustained. (“Mark Twain’s Book,” 6)
Clemens published a long excerpt from the review—omitting the remarks about irreverence, however—in the 9 October Buffalo Express (“Advertising Supplement,” 1).
By the end of August, six weeks after the American Publishing Company received the first 403 copies of Innocents, over 5,800 volumes had been ordered from the bindery to meet the sales demand (APC 1866–79, 46–47, 93).
In a letter no longer extant, Reid had formally invited Clemens to renew the association he had enjoyed with the Tribune while it was under John Russell Young’s management.
MS, Papers of the Reid Family, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (DLC).
L3 , 342–343.
donated to DLC between 1953 and 1973 by Mrs. Helen Rogers Reid and her sons, Whitelaw Reid and Ogden R. Reid.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.