Introduction to the Digital Edition of Mark Twain's Notebooks

Introduction

The digital edition of Mark Twain’s Notebooks aims to publish all fifty-one extant notebooks, with critically edited texts, historical headnotes, annotation, and editorial apparatuses, as well as full-color facsimiles of the manuscript documents. This edition includes material previously published in the Mark Twain Project edition’s Notebooks and Journals, Volume I (1975), Volume II (1975), and Volume III (1979), which contain texts of and editorial materials for Notebooks 1–30. Once these materials are digitally published, the remaining notebooks (31–51) will be edited and published as part of the edition for the first time.

Who Is It For and Why?

In short, everyone.

Mark Twain learned to write on a letterpress, piloted a steamboat on the Mississippi River, crossed Nevada and Utah before they were states, traveled the globe, and of course wrote some of the most memorable novels in American history, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a bold critique of American slavery by a man who witnessed its injustices during his childhood in the antebellum south. He had friendships with famous authors, artists, inventors, and businessmen. He became rich and famous, lost all of his money to bad investments, and won it back by plying his trade as a stage performer and author. He lived the fullest of lives in a century of constant change, and his notebooks were with him throughout. Mark Twain did not maintain large-format desk journals to record his memories in quiet contemplation. He only kept pocket notebooks that he could have with him at all times and that he used to record his impressions on the spot. The notebooks are the documentary record of a remarkably varied life and of the tumultuous nineteenth century.

Mark Twain’s notebooks comprise a series of documents that are often as visually compelling as they are packed with biographical and historical information. For the uninitiated, they will be a gateway into the fascinating life of a genius. For the aficionado and scholar, they are an essential resource containing biographical details and unresolved questions, as well as the creative process of a great American author. They constitute a resource on the nineteenth century writ large, its mores and revolutionary changes.

Timeline

The initial launch of the digital edition in November 2025 published Notebooks 1–5 from the print edition. The remaining twenty-five previously published notebooks are to be released in phases in 2026 and 2027. The remaining Notebooks 31–51 are scheduled to be edited and published in the years to follow.

What’s New?

The digital edition supersedes the print edition in five notable ways described in the sections below.

  1. It provides full-color facsimiles of the manuscript documents.
  2. It revises and modernizes the transcriptions of the manuscript documents.
  3. It offers previously unpublished material.
  4. It has a cross-corpus search tool.
  5. It has features native to the digital format, such as links to notes and feature toggles.

1. Facsimiles in Browsable Image Galleries and in the Texts

The digital edition is facsimile forward: each notebook opens with a browsable gallery of page images. Users can access transcriptions by clicking either the main 'transcription online' button or individual page ‘transcription’ buttons under thumbnails in the image galleries. Within the edited text itself, facsimile thumbnails appear alongside their corresponding transcriptions.

2. Revision and Modernization of the Texts

The digital edition of Mark Twain’s Notebooks revises any typographical errors from the print edition. These revisions may lead to minor differences between quotations in scholarship that uses the digital edition and scholarship that has made or continues to make use of the print edition. Thus, in revising such errors, the digital editors maintain a spreadsheet documenting changes that are made to the print edition for the digital edition; this spreadsheet is made available on this website as a table that will be updated as notebooks become available.

The digital edition also updates the transcriptions of the notebooks to conform with Mark Twain Project’s current transcription policy. In the print edition, the author’s manuscript cancellations of letters, words, and passages are enclosed in angle brackets (<. . .>), and insertions were not rendered inline but documented in the emendations list of the editorial apparatus where they were enclosed between upward and downward pointing arrows (↑. . .↓). For the digital edition, cancellations are rendered with strikethroughs and insertions are rendered inline between ‸carets‸. This brings the texts of the notebooks into conformity with the Project’s current editorial policy for editing manuscripts, which is described in greater detail in the edition’s Guide to Editorial Practice.

3. Previously Unpublished Material

Volume I of the print edition did not include full transcriptions of Notebooks 2 and 3, which Clemens used while learning to pilot a Mississippi riverboat between 1857 and 1861. The notebooks are in fact difficult to decipher, for they were written in Clemens’s idiosyncratic shorthand for a piloting jargon that was known only to Mississippi rivermen and perhaps only in the nineteenth century. For this reason, the editors of the print edition decided to describe the notebooks in summary essays with transcribed excerpts that communicate the sections deemed biographically valuable. Because the digital edition provides facsimiles of the documents, the digital editors found it necessary to provide full transcriptions of both notebooks, if only to facilitate research on the documents, their importance to Mark Twain’s biography, and their relevance to the historical study of nineteenth-century America’s most important transit route and iconic waterway.

In addition to adding texts that were left out of the print edition, the digital edition will also publish the notebooks that have not yet been edited and published in print: Notebooks 31–51. The publication of the remaining notebooks will conclude an editorial endeavor that has been underway for more than a half century.

4. The Cross-corpus Search Tool

The cross-corpus search tool may be the fastest way to begin exploring the rich store of historical and biographical information contained in the notebooks, as long as the user has a keyword or phrase in mind. The search tool allows keyword and phrase searches, with an optional autocomplete toggle, a toggle for including search results in editorial headnotes, a date range filter, and options for sorting results.

While the initial release of the digital edition offers only the texts of Notebooks 1–5, all fifty-one of the notebooks have been transcribed and indexed, and therefore the search tool provides results from the entire corpus. Thus, until all of the notebooks have been formatted and edited for digital publication, the user who identifies notebooks of interest to their queries through the digital edition’s search tool will need to consult the print edition for the complete texts of Notebooks 6–30 and contact the Mark Twain Papers and Project (mtp-library@berkeley.edu) for more information regarding Notebooks 31–51.

5. Other Web Features

The digital edition offers the following features that are unique to their digital format.

  • Linked endnotes and apparatus notes: Instead of paging back and forth from the transcription to notes at the back of the volume, users can click icons in the transcription that link to notes.
  • Three kinds of toggles:
    • Manuscript linebreaks: The default state of the transcriptions is in prose paragraphs, but the user can click the manuscript linebreak toggle and see a line-by-line transcription of the manuscript. This toggle assists users who want to compare the transcription with the facsimile of the manuscript.
    • Page breaks from the print edition: Users who want to cross-reference the digital edition with the print edition can turn on the print edition pagebreak toggle.
    • Placename toggle (Notebooks 2 and 3 only): The newly published texts of Notebooks 2 and 3 feature highlighted Mississippi River placenames that popup on mouseover with a description of the placename. The highlighting and popup can be turned off by clicking the placename toggle.

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When complete, the digital edition of Mark Twain’s Notebooks will be the first comprehensive resource on these rich and fascinating documents, freely available for all to study, admire, and enjoy.