13 July 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01249)
Do you see this puppy’s drift? I enclose a reply, which couple of replies to his letter. Let the attorney send either or neither to Gill. If he thinks mine of June 8th (herewith enclosed) covers the whole ground, —all right—use his own judgment.1explanatory note
If Gill uses my matter without printing my name anywhere in his book he will do himself no good & me no serious harm—& neither will he be violating trademarkⒶemendation, I suppose.
But what he is really up to, I imagine, is to use my name inside the book but not on the cover.2explanatory note
Say—the man is a natural deceiver. The tittleⒶemendation of his series shows it: Treasure Trove means treasure found, I think—whereas his is more properly Treasure Stolen & ought to be so styled. Damn a man who will lie so wantonly.
Osgood had joined with Clemens in threatening legal action against Gill, whose announced Treasure-Trove series included some of Osgood’s authors (see 5 July 75 to Howells, n. 6click to open link). The enclosed copy of Clemens’s most recent (8 June) letter to Gill appears in this volume under its own date. Gill’s answer to it, if any, is not known to survive, nor do the “couple of replies” that Clemens drafted and also enclosed here. It is not known what, if anything, Osgood’s unidentified attorney forwarded to Gill.
Clemens first tried to claim his pseudonym as a trademark in an 1873 lawsuit (8 June 75 to Gill, n. 5click to open link). The first volume in Gill’s Treasure-Trove series, entitled Burlesque, was already in print. On 12 June, Gill pronounced it “nearly ready,” and copies were available by 6 July. Despite Clemens’s threat to “stop that book with an injunction” if it included anything of his, Gill reprinted the one piece that he was legally entitled to: “Encounter with an Interviewer,” on which he owned the copyright. A letter that Clemens wrote to Osgood on 25 January 1876 suggests that Gill offered to compromise by using the sketch without any mention of its author, thereby avoiding a violation of Clemens’s trademark: “But the lawyer says Gill has taken my nom de plume out of the book although he left the article in it. Of course this destroys the possibility of my suing him for violating trade-mark, and I don’t wish to sue him for anything else” (MH-H). Nevertheless, all copies of the book that have been examined include the name “Mark Twain” both in “Contents” and on the first page of the sketch. The earliest copies also list the names of twenty-five Treasure-Trove authors (including Clemens) on the spine. The only documented alteration that Gill made was the removal of this exterior list from later copies—just as Clemens anticipated (“Announcements of Forthcoming Publications,” Publishers’ Weekly 7 [12 June 75]: 620; 8 [17 July 75]: 185; BAL , 8:19127; Moulton 1875; Richard H. Stoddard, 7, 177: copies with authors’ names on the spine at TxU-Hu and NcD; a copy without names at FTS).
MS, Rogers Memorial Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H).
L6 , 511–512; MTLP , 89.
The Henry M. Rogers and Kathleen Rogers Collection was donated in 1930.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.