To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
24 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: Axelrod, UCCL 00562)

Buf. 24th.

Friend Bliss—

Orion says you hardly know whether it is good judgment to throw the Sketch Book on the market & interfere with the Innocents. I believe you are more than half right—it is calculated to do more harm than [good, ]no doubt. So if you like the idea, suppose we defer the Sketch Book till the last. That is, get out the big California & Plains book first of August; then the Diamond book first March or April 1872—& then the Sketch book the following fall. Does that strike you favorably? If so, write out the contract in that way & forward it. By that time I can write a great [many ]brand new sketches & they’ll make the book sell handsomely—& by that time, too, some of the best of the old sketches will be forgotten & will read like new matter.

Drop me a line on it.1

Ys

Clemens.

[letter docketed:] Mark Twain | Jan 24/71

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Orion had first reported Bliss’s opinion to Clemens in a letter (now lost) written between 8 and 14 January. Clemens had in turn replied in a letter, also lost, that arrived in Hartford while Bliss was in New York City (from 16 to 23 January) trying to find and hire Edward Mullen to illustrate the sketchbook. Orion waited for Bliss to return before replying for him, on 25 January, to the mid-January letter. No direct reply to Clemens’s present follow-up is known to survive, or was perhaps needed, since Orion’s 25 January letter must have arrived shortly after Clemens sent it. Orion wrote, in part:

About the sketch-book interfering with the Innocents—Bliss says he is going on with the sketch-book, and you will see which is right. The substance is that it the new book will outsell the old one, and few people want to buy two books from the same author at the same time. (CU-MARK)

Bliss soon agreed to the proposed new order for the three projects already under contract, although the contracts themselves were not revised. Roughing It was not published until February 1872; the diamond mine book was never written; and the sketchbook was postponed until 1875, finally issuing as Sketches, New and Old.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, collection of Todd M. Axelrod.

Previous publication: L4, 308–309; Henkels 1920, lot 297, excerpt; Henkels 1925, lot 57, paraphrase; Hill, 44, excerpt; MTLP, 54.

Provenance:sold by Henkels in 1920 and 1925; an Ayer transcription and a Brownell typescript are both at WU (see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance); the present location of the MS, owned by Axelrod in 1983, is not known.

Emendations and textual notes:

good, • [possibly ‘good.,’]

many • [‘a’ over miswritten ‘m’]