24 June 1876 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS, in pencil: CtY-BR, UCCL 01345)
I am ready for the proofs, now, & shall be still better ready a week or ten days hence.
I hope those pictures have gone to Conway as no doubt they have.1explanatory note
I have been thinkingⒶemendation, & have arrived at the conclusionⒶemendation that if the Company will sell out two-thirds of its copyrights & electrotypesⒶemendation, & also its printing office & presses, by auction, & move back into the cheap quarters again & publish about one or two books at a time, it can declare some more dividends. I will lay the matter by letter before the other directors.2explanatory note They may object, but I hope not, for I think that the present extended business is a considerable detriment to my pocket. I think we publish books so fast that canvassers are likely to merely skim the cream of a district & then “lay” for the next new book. This is only human nature, & they are not to be blamed for it. I know you think differently from me; & perhaps we are both partly right & partly wrong. We will take the sense of the directors, & I shall have to abide by their decision, though I shall be mighty sorry to see Tom Sawyer issue when any other book of the firm is either being canvassed or within four six months of being canvassed.
If the directors will cut the business down two-thirds, & the expenses one half, I think it will be an advantage to all concerned, & I feel persuaded that I shall sell more books.3explanatory note
Please ask Frank to give me my July statement as promptly as he can conveniently, for I have a great curiosity to know what it is going to be.4explanatory note He
Bliss had not yet sent electrotypes of the Tom Sawyer illustrations to Moncure Conway. As of 9 April Clemens had seen proofsheets of only the first two chapters; the batch he received in mid-July may have been the next one that he received (see 4 July 1876 to Conwayclick to open link, n. 2, and 22 July 1876 to Blissclick to open link, n. 1).
Clemens was a stockholder and a director of the American Publishing Company from 1873 until 1881. It is not known if the company had issued any dividends since the last one he received, on 1 April 1874 (24 Mar 1874 to Aldrich, L6 , 92 n. 8).
For Bliss’s response to these proposals, see 22 July 1876 to Blissclick to open link, n. 1.
On 1 July Frank Bliss sent a statement for the second quarter of 1876, showing that Clemens was due $48.92 on sales of 276 copies of The Innocents Abroad (1869), $72.97 on 278 copies of Roughing It (1872), $46.95 on 260 copies of The Gilded Age (1873-74, the same amount went to coauthor Charles Dudley Warner), and $590.85 on 2,506 copies of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (1875), for a total of $759.69. On 20 July, after deducting $13.31 for “items chg’d to you,” Bliss sent him a check for $746.38 (Scrapbook 10:31, CU-MARK; Bliss to SLC, 20 July 1876, CU-MARK). This payment, even less than the disappointing first-quarter return (see 12 April 1876 to Blissclick to open link, n. 1), must have given further impetus to the dissatisfaction with the American Publishing Company expressed here and in the following letter (UCCL 01346click to open link) and again in the letter of 22 July to Elisha Blissclick to open link.
MS, in pencil, CtY-BR.
MTLP , 99.
Donated to CtY in 1942 by Walter F. Frear.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.