22 April 1867 • New York, N.Y. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02444)
I don’t know what use you can make of my autograph, but as far as it will go you are welcome to it, cheerfully.— & if you are anythin and a sentiment also:Ⓐemendation
Thirty days after date I pro-
mise to pay—
It was a slip of the pen—but you will excuse it—it comes of long habit—I so often put my autograph to lit Ⓐemendationthat sort of sentiment.
We will change it to my favorite, which is homely but good:
“Here’s Luck!”
P.S. Excuse all blots & blemishes, as the school-girls Ⓐemendationsay.1explanatory note
The identity of this autograph seeker remains uncertain, but he may be nineteen-year-old Malcolm Townsend, born on 18 December 1847 in New York City and alive as late as 1917. He was the son of Cyrus Townsend, a carriage manufacturer and flatboat trader on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Almost three years after this letter, on 29 January 1870, he was married in Plymouth Church, by Henry Ward Beecher, to Emma Virginia Cox, born in Brooklyn in 1849 and a member of Plymouth Church since 1863. In 1891 Townsend was living in New York and reported that he had “been connected for many years with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and its interests, as Foreign Freight Agent and in other official capacities.” In addition to a genealogy of his family, Townsend compiled three books, apparently published privately: “U.S.”—An Index to Curious Facts in United States History. Historical, Geographical and Political; “Candle and Lamp Lore.” Historical, Ecclesiastical and Legendary; and “Numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.” Mystical, Historical, Ecclesiastical, Mathematical, Including Proverbs and Maxims (Townsend, title page and s.v. “Cyrus Townsend” and “Malcolm Townsend”; Thompson, 240; “Freight Handling by Machines Now,” New York Times, 16 Dec 1917, 11).
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York City (NN-B).
L2 , 28–29; AAA 1924, lot 92, without the salutation and complimentary closing.
On 24 or 25 November 1924, the MS, accompanied by a souvenir menu from the 1900 Lotos Club banquet in Clemens’s honor, was sold as part of the collection of “the late William F. Gable of Altoona, Pennsylvania.” It is not known when it became part of the Berg Collection, given by Dr. Albert A. Berg to NN in 1940 but continuously enlarged by gift and purchase since then. The MS came to the Berg Collection tipped into a copy of the first American edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.