To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
21? September 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CCC2, UCCL 00508)

I turn this over to you.

Am going to write you soon. Yes, will furnish article for paper. 1 Have written Frank. Finished 7th or 8th chap. of book to-day, forget which—am up to page 180.—only about 1,500 ‸1500‸ more to write.2 [in margin: maybe]

Our patient the young lady will hardly recover.3

Write me supper invitation—cannot leave home before spring.4

Yrs

Clemens.

oldest paper in the county. two dollars a year. established 1855.
circulation 1,000.

the lansing weekly mirror, metcalf & co., john t. metcalf,
james t. metcalf, publishers and proprietors.

lansing, iowa, Sept. 19th, 1870. 5

My Dear Sir:

I want to read your admirable book (“The Innocents Abroad”) but us poor d——s of country newspaper men can’t afford to buy one. We don’t know your publishers. Can’t we notice or advertise, and thus come into possession of something good for the mind, of a standard heaps of newspaper men want to reach, but you hold so successfully at your service?

Yrs. Truly

J. T. Metcalf 6
Ed.

S. F Clemens
Esqr.

[letter docketed:]

‸Please send this back to me on a/c of back of it.‸ Please attend to this it was sent to Clements & from him to me. Think you had better send copy & let him adv.7

Bliss

Explanatory Notes

Editorial Signs

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1 Bliss’s paper, which advertised American Publishing Company books, issued once, in late October 1870, as the Author’s Sketch Book. Retitled the American Publisher, it reappeared in early March 1871 (29 Oct 70 to Bliss, n. 1; 4 Mar 71 to OC, n. 3).

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2 The draft of chapters 7 and 8 differed significantly from the final version of those chapters in Roughing It. For an account of the differences, and an explanation of Clemens’s estimate of remaining work—which was affected by his use of clippings of a number of his Buffalo Express articles (with each page of clippings counted as the equivalent of four manuscript pages)—see RI 1993, 812–18.

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3 Emma Nye died on the morning of 29 September. That night her body was taken to the Elmira home of Clara and Alice Spaulding. She was buried the following day. With Olivia now seven months pregnant, and worn down by four months of deathbed attendance on her father and Nye, the Clemenses did not make the trip to Elmira for her funeral (“Sad News to Friends,” Elmira Advertiser, 30 Sept 70, 4).

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4 See 7 May 70 to Bliss.

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5 If mailed on 19 September, this letter probably reached Clemens by 21 September, and he could have sent it on to Bliss that same day or shortly thereafter.

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6 It is not known whether John T. or James T. Metcalf wrote this letter.

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7 Bliss lined through Clemens’s letter to indicate that it had been answered and that a copy of Innocents had been sent. No review has been found in the available file of the weekly Lansing Mirror, which, however, lacked several issues between September and December 1870.

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8 Since Clemens did not date his note, the American Publishing Company’s clerk adopted Metcalf’s date to file it.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, on the back of J. T. Metcalf to SLC, 19 Sept 70 (UCLC 31687), Ella Strong Denison Library of the Claremont Colleges, Claremont (CCC2).

Previous publication: L4, 196–98; brief excerpts in MTMF, 138 n. 3; Hill, 44; MTLP, 41 n.

Provenance:The MS evidently remained among the American Publishing Company’s files until it was sold (and may have been copied at that time by Dana Ayer; see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance). The Ayer transcription was in turn copied by a typist and both the handwritten and typed transcriptions are at WU.