Included here in facsimile is a selection of documents prepared in 1884 and 1885 by Charles L. Webster & Company, New York, and by one of its general agents, the Occidental Publishing Company, San Francisco, to promote the sale of the first American edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because the book was to be sold nationwide by subscription and because Clemens did not want to issue it before 40,000 copies had been sold, the Webster company needed to hire a large crew of local sales agents, or canvassers. Prospective canvassers received circulars such as the one issued by the Occidental Publishing Company of San Francisco, whom Webster had contracted to act as general agents for the entire Pacific Coast1 (see figures 1 and 2). Boasting that Mark Twain’s books were the “Quickest Selling in the World,” the advertisement offered financial incentives to agents who made large sales: “TO EVERY CANVASSER selling 50 copies of the book, we will send five additional copies FREE.”

The salesman’s prospectus included either of two advertisements geared toward the book-buying public, one signed by the Webster company (see figures 3 and 4), and the other by the Occidental Publishing Company (see figure 5). These assured the reader that every line was “FRESH AND NEW” and “NOT a sentence of this book has ever before appeared in print in any form.” Each company may also have issued a separate advertising brochure.

Charles L. Webster & Company’s first public announcements of the book appeared in the November 1884 issues of Youth’s Companion and the December issue of Century Magazine and served the dual functions of calling for local agents and advertising the book for the public (see figures 6, 7, and 8).

Webster and Company (and, after 1896, Harper and Brothers) continued [begin page 656] to promote the book in leading journals, using advertisements that had at least the author’s tacit approval. A sampling reproduced here includes a three-quarter page ad that Webster placed in the Publishers’ Trade List Annual for 1889 (see figure 9); it offers a brief summary of the story as well as an illustration from the book. Two years later, the same illustration appeared at the back of Webster and Company’s “cheap edition” of Huckleberry Finn, on a page listing the “NEW HOLIDAY SET OF MARK TWAIN’S BOOKS” (see figure 10). Advertising at the back of other Webster and Company books in 1892 offered the “New cheap edition of the laughable adventures of Huck Finn and a runaway slave in a raft journey along the Mississippi,” containing “the famous description of a Southern feud” (for example, page 4 of advertising matter at the back of A Perplexed Philosopher by Henry George).