1 The Imperial copyright on Tom Sawyer did not prevent Belford Brothers of Toronto from publishing a pirated edition in July 1876, but not for the reason Clemens gives: Conway could not have registered the work in Canada because it was not printed there. Bliss himself had told Clemens in December 1876 about the “60 days before publication” requirement, but the Canadian Copyright Act of 1875 explicitly states that a copyright could be obtained without regard to the timing of publication (see 2 Nov 1876, 13 Dec 1876, and 10 Jan 1877 to Conway).

2 The Imperial copyright on Tom Sawyer had probably been transferred from Clemens to Chatto and Windus following his November 1876 correspondence with Conway, but no independent evidence of the transfer has been found (see 2 Nov 1876 to Conway, nn. 2, 3). The law on the residency requirement was open to interpretation. An 1868 lawsuit, Routledge v. Low, had established that an American author who published simultaneously in England but resided in Canada, even temporarily, was entitled to an Imperial copyright. Although two of the judges in that case further opined that an author’s place of residence was irrelevant, their opinion was incidental to the decision and had no legal force (Dawson 1882, 19–26). According to legal expert William B. Hale, after the 1891 Chace Act (this country’s first international copyright law) established reciprocal rights with Great Britain, the “law officers of the Crown in England were consulted by the American law officers, and they advised that an American author could acquire copyright in his work by simultaneous publication in this country and America, even although he was not at any time resident within the British dominions.” But this right was not statutory until the passage of the English copyright law of 1911 (Hale 1917, 1057).