Clemens wrote this letter on nine unnumbered scraps of paper, usually writing on both sides of each scrap. Three different paper stocks are represented, two from letters written to him or his publisher, with the result that someone else’s handwriting in brown (originally black) ink appears randomly beneath and around his own, which is in purple ink. One penciled calculation (on the first scrap) was even written by his wife, before he appropriated the sheet for this letter. The point of this elaborate visual joke was to tease Jane Clemens about her inveterate habit of writing letters on what Samuel C. Webster later described as “any sheet of paper that happened to be handy” ( MTBus , 66). Clemens had complained in an April 1863 letter, written in Virginia City: “Ma, write on whole letter sheets—is paper scarce in St Louis?” ( L1 , 247). Webster cited this remark in 1946 when he asserted that Clemens had taken “considerable pains” to cure her of this habit by sending her from Nevada “a letter composed of papers of every size, color, and shape, including wrapping paper, the scraps all jumbled together and stuffed into an envelope. She spent several indignant hours sorting it out” ( MTBus , 66). If Clemens did send an earlier “scraps” letter, it has not survived. It is much more probable, however, that Webster was describing the present letter at second hand, drawing on a family story and guessing, from the 1863 remark, that Clemens had sent it from the West. For a facsimile of the original letter and the procedure used to reproduce it, see Photographs and Manuscript Facsimilesclick to open link and the textual commentary.

This and four other scraps evidently came from a letter to Isaac E. Sheldon asking permission to syndicate the text and eleven illustrations of “The House That Jack Built” from the (Burlesque) Autobiography. The letter, which Sheldon must have forwarded to Clemens, was apparently from Ansel Nash Kellogg (1832–86), editor and publisher of the New York Railroad Gazette, and owner of the A. N. Kellogg Newspaper Company of Chicago, a syndicate that supplied 240 country newspapers with “auxiliary sheets” or “insides”—full newspaper sheets printed weekly on one side only with features, illustrations, telegraph news, and advertising, to which a subscriber could add local matter on the blank side (Mrja, 180–82; Rowell, 205–7). No evidence has been found that Clemens agreed to the request, or that he answered the letter.

See 7 June 71 to OC and MEC, n. 2click to open link.

This scrap and the last one came from a letter of which little more than the dateline and part of the complimentary close and signature survive. The writer, “Vernol,” has not been identified.

The Fredonia Censor of 31 May 1871 reported that on the evening of 30 May (Decoration Day) a band of ten or fifteen “rowdies” from neighboring Dunkirk, who were “intoxicated and turbulent,” caused a disturbance aboard a Fredonia horsecar, injuring the driver, who had tried to restrain them (“Riotous Doings,” 3).

The Dunkirk rowdies had, for the most part, escaped the police, causing the editor of the Fredonia Censor to remark that “if we have no material here for policemen able to cope with the Dunkirk roughs who invade the village hereafter, let some be advertised for and imported. That failing, start a Vigilance committee. Rope enough will be cheerfully donated to give each rowdy a separate noose” (“The Two Rioters . . .,” 7 June 71, 3).

Possibly a scrap that originally followed here has been lost, but it is much more likely that Clemens intentionally left this sentence unfinished.

See 7 June 71 to OC and MEC, n. 3click to open link.

This undated postscript, written in pencil on both sides of a torn scrap of paper, is almost certainly an addendum to Clemens’s letter of 11 June 1871 to Jane Lampton Clemens, which he wrote on nine scraps as a joke ( L4 , 403–6). The postscript was not previously associated with the letter, in part because it had become separated from the other scraps. The form of the letter is unique, however, and the paper of this scrap apparently matches the paper of two of the other nine scraps. Moreover, the subject is Langdon Clemens (the “cubbie”), and mid-1871 is one of the few periods in Langdon’s short life when he was robust enough for Clemens to joke about his health ( L4 , 398 n. 1). Although the measles vaccine was not introduced into North America until 1963, in the 1750s a Scottish doctor, Francis Home (1710–1801), experimented with measles inoculation by transferring blood from an infected patient to an uninfected patient, thereby causing a “much milder” form of the disease (Cliff, Haggett, and Smallman-Raynor, 62; Kurstak, 70). Although some form of measles inoculation may have been practiced in 1871, no report of it has been found. Smallpox vaccine was certainly available, and some doctors believed that it also provided protection from measles, or resulted in milder cases. Clemens himself was vaccinated or revaccinated for smallpox in Chicago in late December 1871 and thereafter urged Olivia, “Get vaccinated—right away—no matter if you were vaccinated 6 months ago—the theory is, keep doing it” ( L4 , 521; Jones, 434–35; Strout).