To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
1 August 1869 • Elmira, N.Y.
(Transcript: CU-MARK, UCCL 00328)

Elmira [Aug. 1 ]

Friend Bliss—

I had some notion of running up to Hartford, but I believe I shall not be able to do it. I suppose you are right about sending the books to the newspapers the first thing,—you are old in the business & ought to know best—though I thought maybe it would have been better to get all your machinery in trim first.1 However, after so long a time to get ready in, you must surely be about as ready as it is possible to be in this world, anyhow. I wrote you a wicked letter, & was sorry afterward that I did it, for it occurred to me that perhaps you had very good reasons for delaying the book till fall which I did not know anything about. But you didn’t state any reasons, you know—& I have been out of humor for a week. I had a bargain about concluded for the purchase of an interest in a daily paper & when everything seemed to be going smoothly, the owner raised on me. I think I have got it all straightened up again, now, & therefore am in a reasonably good humor again.2 If I made you mad, I forgive you.

The 3 books you speak of have not come. How did you direct them?—to Twain or Clemens?—& by what express did you send them?

I have received a jolly good letter from Henry Clay Trumbull, which I enclose. You had better go & tell him this is a plenty good enough notice, if he will let it be printed with his name signed to it.3

Yrs Truly,

Saml L. Clemens.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Clemens had received this icy rejoinder, dictated around 30 July (CU-MARK), to his 22 July letter:

UCLC31935

Click to add citation to My Citations.

Bliss registered the copyright for Innocents on 28 July, probably just before sending this brief note (Copyright). For his full reply to Clemens’s 22 July outburst, see 12 Aug 69 to Bliss, n. 1. For the Elmira newspapers’ responses to Innocents, see 14 Aug 69 to Bliss, nn. 1, 4, and 15 Aug 69 to Bliss, n. 1.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 Sometime between 16 and 22 July, Clemens had returned from Cleveland to Elmira irritated with Abel Fairbanks’s revised terms for a share of the Cleveland Herald (see 5 July 69 to Mary Mason Fairbanks, n. 4). But he evidently made an effort to reconcile himself, writing Fairbanks on 26 July to inquire about the paper’s assets and the increase in Fairbanks’s asking price. On 27 July, Fairbanks replied in some haste, apparently trying to mollify Clemens both with explanations and an adjusted price (CU-MARK):

You were misled as to our profits decreasing from year to year— ...

I have had an offer, of $100.000 for one half of the concern, and since that time we have added $10.000 to $15.000, and the business has increased largely, but you know it is almost impossible to set an absolute correct valuation upon an institution of this kind.

In the first offer I made you, I then felt & do now, that it was a fair one, however, I may be mistaken—

I have great confidence in the ability of the office to make money, with the proper effort—it is like land, left idle would produce nothing, but with judicious management & tilling, would abundantly reward the effort—

I should have been glad to [have] had Mr. L & yourself here, and let you examine more closely & I explain more fully, all that you might wish to know—

Let me make a proposition, that I will take $50.000 for one quarter of the office—as it stands, assuring you there are no debts against it, & you become interested in all that is due it—

Let me hear from you. My people are all well—

Yours truly

A. W. Fairbanks

Clemens probably received this letter no earlier than 1 August, when he and the Langdons returned from three days at Niagara Falls. If he read it before writing to Bliss, he apparently did so without perceiving what he would soon understand—that the new offer in effect raised the price again, from $62,500 for the one-third share he wanted to $50,000 for an insufficient one-fourth. And this offer, too little and too costly, was also too late. For Clemens had already received and was considering an offer of a one-third share of the Buffalo Express (see 14 Aug 69 to the Fairbankses).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 The enclosure has not been found. Trumbull’s position as a well-known Congregational minister, member of a socially prominent Hartford family, and New England secretary of the American Sunday-School Union, would have made his endorsement of The Innocents Abroad reassuring to readers worried that the book was subversive or irreverent. After conferring with Trumbull, however, Bliss decided to use the letter “privately not publicly” (see 12 Aug 69 to Bliss, n. 1). In 1870, after Innocents had achieved a large sale in spite of such fears, Bliss observed: “Even the ministers throughout the land who at first predicted, from its title and its subject it would prove sacrilegious, have found it very far from it, and now recommend it to their friends in high glee. ... Sunday school libraries are adding it to their lists, and Sunday school teachers turn to it for information when they want to talk of the Holy Land” (Bliss).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

TS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), courtesy Goodspeed’s Book Shop, Boston.

Previous publication: L3, 286–88; MTMF 101, excerpt; MTLP, 24–25.

Provenance:The MS was sold in 1967 by Goodspeed’s Book Shop. Its present location is not known.

Emendations and textual notes:

Aug. 1 • Aug.1