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1
Clemens wrote on Saturday. His “hurry” seems to
have been prompted, at least in part, by his plan to leave for Elmira
(by way of New York City), which he did on Thursday, 8
May—the same day he and Warner finally met with Bliss to sign
the contract for
The Gilded Age. Bliss agreed to
a 10 percent royalty (5 percent to each author) on the retail price of
every book sold (see
Contract for the American Publishing Company Gilded Age and
16 July 73 to Bliss,
n. 2). London publisher George Routledge was also in Hartford
that day and may have joined them to discuss arrangements for the
English edition. The manuscript itself was probably not delivered to
Bliss until late May, after Warner had revised it (“Brief
Mention,” Hartford
Courant, 8 May 73,
2;
12 May 73 to Redpath, n. 1;
16 July 73 to Bliss).
Isaac E. Sheldon’s prediction of failure in publishing
“a novel by subscription” was merely the received
wisdom at this time, both among trade and subscription publishers. When
Bliss issued
The Gilded Age in December 1873, it
became the first novel published by subscription. In April 1871 Clemens
had proposed writing “quite a respectable novel”
for publication by Sheldon, who had been encouraging: “I like
the idea & it would sell well if it were a good story
& had a quiet vein of humor as well as the tragic interest of
a story. I do not see why you could not write such a story”
(
L4, 375, 376 n. 1). The “story” in question
was probably a version of
The Gilded Age, which
Clemens then thought of writing with Joseph T. Goodman. The present
letter shows that he must have talked with Sheldon again, this time
about the novel he and Warner had actually written. Bliss was
predisposed to regard Sheldon as a rival, having objected to his
publication, in March 1871, of
Mark Twain’s
(Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (
SLC 1871) as a violation of his
own exclusive contract with Clemens (see
L4, 320–21 n. 1). That rivalry may have influenced his
decision to agree to the 10 percent royalty. In general, subscription
publishers paid authors far more than did trade publishers, as Warner
implicitly acknowledged on 19 April when he informed James R. Osgood of
his own, presumably temporary, defection from the retail trade:
“Mark Twain and I have been writing a novel the last two
months, but it will have to go into the subscription trade here, and we
hope that our high art will be rewarded with several dollars”
(
CtHMTH; see also
Hill 1964, 6–13,
71).
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2
On 3 May 1871 Clemens had urged Bliss to consider publishing a book that
Edward H. House was writing about Japan. Bliss was interested, but the
project was not pursued until House evidently revived it during his
recent visit to Clemens, in late April. Despite Clemens’s
suggestion here, by late 1873 Bliss had reached an agreement with House,
who wrote him from Japan on 25 November that the “MSS.
progresses with reasonable rapidity, and as there seems to be ample
time, I am seeing through a new series of observations, in order to make
it additionally accurate and complete” (
ViU). Ultimately, however, the American Publishing
Company did not publish House’s book (see
L4, 388, 389 n. 1;
25 and 26 Apr 73 to OLC, n. 8).
Transcript facsimile. The editors have not seen the original hand-written
transcript, made by Dana S. Ayer during the late 1890s or later, which is in the
Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (
WU).
subscription. •
subscription‸ [written off edge]