To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
per Olivia L. Clemens
with revisions by Samuel L. Clemens
30 May 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CtY-BR, UCCL 00473)

Buffalo May 30th 1870

Mr E. Bliss
Dear Sir

Will you send a copy of the book to Mr A. D. Munson 187 Broadway N. Y. I will enclose an autograph to be put in it— He has been reading from the book and has been the means of selling 30 coppies of it, and his [copp copy] has become so [soiled] by parties handling it to find out how to get‸send for‸ a copy that he wants a new one—1

The scrap which I enclose about the Russian minister is ‸entirely‸ reliable—

About the dinner—I cannot go on to Hartford very well for the dinner and I have a plan which seems to me a good one, ‸Write a dinner invitation to me and‸ Let me write a speach [for the dinner and publish it, as a speach made at a dinner in honor of our having reached 70000 copies of the book—] ‸ in answer to an ‸a dinner‸ invitation from you, and you ‸ ‸and you publish it.‸ That will answer the same purpose as if we had a dinner, and I should have to send the speach to the dinner any way instead of going myself— What do you think of that plan?2

Yours Truly

Samℓ L. Clemens
Per O. L.

[enclosure:] 3

[letter docketed:] [and] Mark Twain | May 30/70 | Author

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Munson edited and published The Minnesota Messenger, Containing Sketches of the Rise and Progress of Minnesota (St. Paul: 1855). Nothing is known of his readings from The Innocents Abroad.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 See 7 May 70 to Bliss.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 The original enclosure has not been found: it is simulated here, from the Buffalo Express of 23 May 1870 (2), reset line for line. Clemens described Tsar Aleksandr’s reception in chapter 37 of Innocents, and, in 1867, in his notebook and in letters to his family and to the New York Tribune and the San Francisco Alta California (N&J1, 404–11; L2, 81–83; SLC 1867 [MT00565], 1867 [MT00582], 1867 [MT00584]). In July he arranged to have copies of the book sent to the tsar and to Konstantin Gavrilovich Katakazi (1830–90), Russian minister to the United States from 1869 to 1872 (Ruskii Biograficheskii Slovar, 8:546): see 18 July 70 to Bliss.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR). The original enclosure, which does not survive, was a clipping from the Buffalo Express (“The Russian Minister . . . ,” 23 May 70, 2). Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Buffalo and Erie County Library (NBu).

Previous publication: L4, 146–147.

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

Emendations and textual notes:

copp copy • coppy

soiled • soiled | soiled [corrected miswriting]

for . . . book— • [canceled by SLC; deletion of dash implied]