To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
11 March 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: NN-B, UCCL 00443)

lc

‸ Confidential—for the present.‸

Buffalo, Mch. 11.

Friend Bliss—

I turned the check for $4,309.45 over to Mr. Langdon yesterday—I shall not use the money for a month yet, & he will pay me [ f ] interest. I expected to want it peremptorily in February, but didn’t.1

A first-class New York magazine wants me to edit a humorous department in it. They want ten pages a month. They offer twenty-four hundred dollars a year for the service, & then they want a publishing house there to ‸have the privilege of‸ issue ‸ing‸ the matter in book form at the end of the year in a $1.50 book (250 pp. 12mo,) & pay me a royalty of 20 per cents on each copy sold. I have just written them that you would have to have a bid in the matter.2 I also wrote that I would do the editing for $2,000 a year editing for a little trifle editing only on condition that I own the matter after use in the magazine & have the privilege of doing just what I please with it. All this had better be kept still for the present.

[No—shan’t go east for a long time.

I have a sort of vague half-notion of spending the summer in England. I could write a telling book. But who we don’t like to leave our delightful nest even for a day. When Have you heard yet what the possibilities are in the matter of selling our book there?3

Yrs

Clemens

P. S.—I take ‸consider‸ the magazine because it will give an opening for higher-class writing—stuff which I hate to shovel into a daily newspaper. ]

[letter docketed:] auth [and] Mark Twain | March 11/70 | Author

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 See 28 Jan 70 to Bliss, n. 5, and 2 and 3 Mar 70 to Langdon, n. 4.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 The admonition about Bliss’s “bid” was probably in the missing portion of the previous letter. The publisher of the Galaxy was Sheldon and Company in New York.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 Bliss’s reply does not survive, but could hardly have been encouraging (3 Mar 70 to Bliss, n. 2). Clemens’s thoughts of England may have been prompted by an offer from Jervis Langdon to underwrite a European trip (13 Jan 70 to OLL, n. 6).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).

Previous publication: L4, 90–91; AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 124, excerpt; MTMF, 128 n. 1, excerpt; McElderry, xii, excerpt; Hill, 41, excerpt; MTLP, 30, brief paraphrase.

Provenance:The MS, in the collection of Edmund W. Evans of Oil City, Pennsylvania, was sold in 1934; in 1935 it was offered in another sale of several collections, including that of Mr. and Mrs. William K. Bixby of St. Louis; by 1939 it was in the collection of William T. H. Howe; in 1940, Dr. Albert A. Berg bought and donated the Howe Collection to NN-B.

Emendations and textual notes:

f • [partly formed]

No . . . newspaper. • [MS page renumbered from ‘5’ to ‘3’]