To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
per Samuel C. Thompson
16 July 1873 • London, England
(MS: CtY-BR, UCCL 00953)

Langham Hotel
London
July 16.

Friend Bliss,

We shall issue a copyright edition of the novel here in fine style—three [volumes;] and in order that there shall be no mistakes I wish you would be particular to send sheets and duplicate casts of the pictures by successive steamers always.1 And send these casts and proofs along as fast as you get a signature done. Be sure to write on to Routledge [and] state as nearly as you can the exact day at which you can publish. Routledge will publish on that day or the day before. If you change the date of publication telegraph Routledge.

I told Joquin Miller to write you proposing 7½ per cent for his book.2

Yours Truly,

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

[letter docketed:] [and] Saml Clemens | July 16″ 73 [and] Joaquin Miller | July 16th 1873 | Author

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The English edition of The Gilded Age, published by George Routledge and Sons, was typeset from proofsheets of the American edition (27 July 73 to Bliss, n. 2) and illustrated with duplicate electrotypes (“casts”) of the engravings. It included fewer than half the illustrations prepared for the American edition, however. All of the full-page engravings were omitted (evidently because they were too large for the English-edition page format), and as the book progressed, more and more of the small ones were absent as well, so that the third volume contained only three. Presumably the engravings for the last third of the book were completed too late for inclusion in the English edition.

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2 Bliss’s American Publishing Company issued Miller’s book as Unwritten History: Life amongst the Modocs (reversing the title and subtitle of the English edition) in late October 1874. In March 1874 Clemens told Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Bliss had contracted to pay me 10 p.c. on my next book (contract made 18 months ago) so I made him pay that on Roughing Gilded Age. He paid 7½ p.c. on Roughing It & 5 p.c. on Innocents Abroad. I only made him pay 7½ on Joaquin Miller’s Modoc book, because I don’t think Miller much of a card in America” (24 Mar 74, MH-H, in MTLP, 81). Clemens alluded to the contract signed on 22 June 1872: see 11 June 72 to Sutro, n. 1, and Contract with American Publishing Company, 22 June 1872.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Willard S. Morse Collection, Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR). Thompson made this fair copy from the stenographic version of the letter that he had recorded in his notebook from Clemens’s dictation (CU-MARK; see N&J1, 567).

Previous publication: L5, 416–417; MTLP, 77.

Provenance:The Morse Collection was donated to CtY in 1942 by Walter F. Frear.

Emendations and textual notes:

volumes • [possibly ‘volumses’]

and • and and