27 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS paraphrase: CU-MARK, UCCL 11799)
I wrote Sheldon to-day that protesting against a higher price than 25 cents for the pamphlet.1explanatory note
Clemens himself made this note of his letter, now missing, on the envelope of the 25 January letter from Orion. Orion reported that in New York Bliss had seen Sheldon, who was preparing to issue Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance:
Sheldon told him it was to be a 50 cent pamphlet & 75¢ in muslin. Against that Bliss protests. . . . He says if you let that be printed in muslin he will not come down on you with the contract, but he will always feel like you haven’t treated him right. His company enjoys the prestige of being the sole publishers of Mark Twain, which they use with their agents, and the advantage of this prestige they will lose if a book of yours comes back pu out published by somebody else. He ridicules Sheldon’s talk of expensive cuts, saying those in the Innocents cost $60 a page—the full page cuts. . . .
Bliss is anxious that my letter should not show any feeling on his part in regard to the Sheldon pamphlet. (CU-MARK)
Clemens’s 15 July 1870 contract for Roughing It with the American Publishing Company stipulated that he was “not to write or furnish manuscript for any other book unless for said company during the preparation & sale of said manuscript & book” (Book Contract for Roughing It click to open link). The muslin binding and the price, Bliss felt, would turn the pamphlet into a book. Clemens’s letter, together with a discussion he had with Sheldon in New York on 1 February, led to an agreement by which Sheldon was to publish only seventy-five copies of the (Burlesque) Autobiography in muslin. But Sheldon seems not to have abided by that agreement, and the pamphlet issued in March in both paper and cloth bindings, priced at forty and seventy-five cents respectively, without limit on the number of cloth copies ( ET&S1 , 565; “Mark Twain’s New Book,” Galaxy 11 [Apr 71]: verso of “Contents”; Sikes).
MS paraphrase on envelope of OC to SLC, 25 Jan 71click to open link (UCLC 47023), Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 320–321.
see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.