23 October 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: DLC, UCCL 02467)
I enclose printed title of a Drama entitled “Ah Sin” which Mr. Bret Harte & I wish to copyright.
Please collect the check for $1 which I formerly sent.1explanatory note
Ys Truly
Samℓ. L. Clemens
letter docketed: “Mark Twain” enclosure docketed: copyright oct 25 1876 and in pencil: 11948G | 100 Dram | a of U. S
The letter that presumably accompanied this payment has not been located.
Clemens requested this title page in his letter of 11 October to Howellsclick to open link. Howells sent it a few days later, probably with a cover letter that is not known to survive. In accordance with Clemens’s request, only the first line, except for the colon, is printed. The colon and the rest of the information are in Clemens’s “penmanship.” Copyright was entered at the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress on 25 October 1876, under number 11948 (Lehr 1982, 2; Dramatic Compositions 1918, 1:30). Clemens evidently did not acknowledge receipt of the title page, leading Howells to remind him, at the end of the following letter, that he had sent it (CU-MARK):
Neither Howells’s enclosed specimen page nor Clemens’s response to his letter has been found. By “Elzevirs” Howells meant books published by the Dutch printing firm founded in Leiden in 1580 by Lowys Elzevir. Before the original firm shut down in 1712—the modern firm Elsevier succeeded it in 1880—it published thousands of titles, classical as well as popular. The company's anonymous historian reported, “The use of the word ‘Elzevir’ as a noun describing a ‘pocket-book’ sized collector’s edition of the classics became quite commonplace in the educated parlance of the late nineteenth century” (Elsevier 2005, 1–2). Clemens presumably rejected Howells’s proposal for the same “mercenary” reasons he had declined an 1875 proposal from the Atlantic Monthly’s publishers (see 12 Feb 1875 to Houghton and Company, L6 , 379–80). In 1877 he issued his own pocket-sized book, A True Story, and the Recent Carnival of Crime, reprinting those two Atlantic Monthly sketches, through James R. Osgood and Company (SLC 1874d; SLC 1876h; SLC 1877b). Howells alluded to Harte’s foolish and immoderate attack, in September 1876 letters to the New York press, on critics of his play, Two Men of Sandy Bar (for details of the episode and Harte’s letters, see AutoMT2, 631–32; Scharnhorst 1992, 56–59; Scharnhorst 1995, 144–45; Harte 1997, 128–33, 135–37, 139–41).
MS, Papers of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, DLC.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
The Spofford Papers were acquired by DLC between 1923 and 1982, primarily as a donation from Barbara Spofford Morgan.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.