7 August 1872 • New Saybrook, Conn. (MS: CtY-BR, UCCL 00787)
This is to acknowledge receipt of copyright to Aug. 1, $8,485.17, less $5,000 previously advanced to me by you before it was due.1explanatory note
I have written strongly to Anna Dickinson.2explanatory note
How about Harte’s rooms?3explanatory note
Hurry up your figuring on the volume of sketches,4explanatory note for I leave for England in 10 or 12 days to be gone several months.
letter docketed: S. L. Clemens | Saybrook | Conn | Aug 7/72 and auth and Sam’l Clemens | For Year 1872
Anna E. Dickinson, having decided to “write a book, and get a pot of money” (as she reportedly told Whitelaw Reid), was considering signing with Bliss and the American Publishing Company (Chester, 131). With Charles Dudley Warner’s endorsement (“I think it is a good company. But it has been made by Mark Twain’s books. It had not much luck before”), Dickinson wrote to Bliss (Warner to Dickinson, 11 July 72, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, DLC). On 23 July she informed Clemens that she had demanded “a guarantee of $10,000 at the rate of 7½ per ct. ... I shall be indebted to you if you will impress it upon the mind of your friend that I wont write the book for less” (CU-MARK). Clemens’s “strongly” worded response to Dickinson has not been found. He may have described the merits of the company, or, perhaps, discouraged her peremptory demand of a $10,000 guarantee. Dickinson had previously published only one book, What Answer? (1868), a melodramatic romance that had little success. Over the next two years, she continued to solicit opinions about Bliss’s company and royalty arrangements. In June 1874 she told Clemens that she was “simmering over a book” that she hoped would meet Bliss’s “approbation.” No agreement was ever reached, however, even though Bliss offered her an 8 percent royalty (Dickinson to SLC, 23 June 74, CU-MARK; Charles E. Perkins to Dickinson, 26 June 74, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, DLC). Dickinson’s next book, A Paying Investment, was published in 1876 by James R. Osgood and Company (Chester, 106, 166, 173; Charles Dudley Warner to Dickinson, 31 July 73, and George H. Warner to Dickinson, 29 May 74, both in Anna E. Dickinson Papers, DLC; Dickinson to SLC, 1 July 74, CU-MARK).
Clemens still expected to fulfill his December 1870 contract with the American Publishing Company for a collection of sketches, despite having diverted to the Routledge sketchbooks the printer’s copy he had originally prepared for Bliss (21 Mar 72 to Bliss, n. 1click to open link).
MS, Willard S. Morse Collection, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR).
L5 , 140–141; MTLP , 73–74.
The Morse Collection was donated to CtY in 1942 by Walter F. Frear.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.