1 Clemens was responding to the following letter from Bliss (CU-MARK), who had had his manuscript since the previous August:

This guileful letter told Clemens just where his book stood in the production process, even as it avoided saying that it was several months behind schedule and could not possibly “issue early in the Spring.” Bliss succeeded in loosening Clemens’s already shaky grasp of the situation. Even though his contract of 16 October 1868 specified that the book was to be typeset and plated, ready for printing, “during the next 4 months” (within a week of Bliss’s letter), no proofs were ready because no type had been set, and no type had been set because (as Bliss acknowledged) not even the first one hundred fifty illustrations had been electrotyped, the process that necessarily preceded the typesetter’s inserting them in the type. The typesetters would not begin until enough of the electroplated engravings were at hand to allow their work to proceed uninterrupted. Bliss also tried to minimize at least one source of possible future delay: the author’s taking seriously his contractual commitment to “give all neccessary time & attention to the reading of proofs & corre[c]ting the same if necessary.” But Clemens was more alert to this ploy, at least in part because of his 1867 experience with the Jumping Frog book, for which he had allowed Charles Henry Webb not only to read the proof but to make alterations—with unfortunate results. Clemens reached Hartford on 5 March, later than expected, and only then did he see his first proofs (L2, 39–40, 421–22; Hirst, 197–99; Elisha Bliss, Jr., to SLC, 12 July 69, and Francis E. Bliss to SLC, 17 July 69, both in CU-MARK).