To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
28 January 1870 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00418)

Elmira, Jan. 28.

Friend Bliss—

I want you to do just as a you please with that Evans. I wash my hands of him. I guess he is just as likely to be a “beat” as anything else—though fools are so cheap & so plenty that I had placed him in that catalogue, for charity’s sake.1

I re-enclose the Express letter, as you desire. I only meant you to correspond with our people about it. I never bother or meddle with the concern’s business matters—& ought to have told them to write you, & not shove it off on to my shoulders. I don’t care two cents about the concern’s business. And what I want you there for, is because I want a man who can run the business department without boring anybody else with it.2 I hate business.

Yes, I am satisfied with the way you are running the book. You are running it in staving, tip-top, first-class style. I never wander into u any corner of the country but I find that [any ] agent has been there before me, & many of that community have read the book. And on an average about ten people a day come & hunt me up to thank me & tell me I’m a benefactor!! I guess that is a part of the programme we didn’t expect, in the first place.

Indeed I don’t want to bother with booksellers or anybody else. That chap in Buffalo wanted me to speak a word to you for him, & I said I was too lazy—& if he would make Larned3 write the letter, I would [endorse, w ] it, whether it were true or false. And I did. But when I saw a great stack of “Innocents” in his bookstore, next d an hour or so afterward, I was rather sorry I did.4

January & Dec. have November didn’t pan out as well as December—for you remember you had sold 12,000 copies in December when Twichell & I were there on the 27th or 28th. But $4,000 is pretty gorgeous. One don’t pick that up often, with a book. It is the next best thing to lecturing.5

I think you are rushing this book in a manner to be proud of; & you will make the finest success of it that has ever been made with a subscription book, I believe. What with advertising, establishing agencies, &c., you have got an enormous lot of machinery to under way & hard at work in a wonderfully short [ p ] space of time. It is easy to see, when one travels around, that one must be endowed with a deal of [genuine generalship ] in order to maneuvre a volume publication whose line of battle stretches from end to end of a great continent, & whose foragers & [ sh skirmishers ] invest every hamlet & [ bel besiege ] every village hidden away in all the vast space between.

I’ll back you against any publisher in America, Bliss—or elsewhere.

Yrs as Ever

Clemens.

[letter docketed:] [and] Mark Twain | Jany 28/70 [and] Mark Twain | Jany 28/70

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Albert S. Evans (1831–72), originally from New Hampshire, was the city editor and local reporter of the San Francisco Alta California and also a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Tribune. Between 1864 and 1866, corresponding for the Gold Hill Evening News under the name “Amigo,” Evans engaged with Clemens, the local reporter for the San Francisco Morning Call and then the San Francisco correspondent for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, in a war of published insults and personal attacks informed by genuine bad feeling on both sides. Throughout their running feud Clemens referred to Evans contemptuously as “Stiggers” or as “Fitz Smythe,” borrowing the names of the comic foils Evans created in his columns. Presumably the well-publicized commercial success of The Innocents Abroad had led Evans to approach the American Publishing Company with a book proposal, and Bliss had in turn asked Clemens for comment. Later in 1870, Bliss did publish Evans’s Our Sister Republic: A Gala Trip Through Tropical Mexico in 1869–70. Evans died aboard the steamer Missouri, which burned at sea en route from New York to Havana on 22 October 1872 (ET&S2, 39–40, 329, 336; Smith and Anderson, 17–47; Evans 1866 [bib11812], 1866 [bib11813], 1866 [bib11814]; 29 Oct 70 to Bliss, n. 2; “Col. Albert S. Evans,” San Francisco Illustrated Press 1 [Jan 73]: 6; “Horrors of Travel,” New York Tribune, 31 Oct 72, 1).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 See 22 Jan 70 to Bliss, n. 1. Clemens’s notion that Bliss should help manage the Express resulted from dissatisfaction with its profitability. He remained uneasy about the paper’s financial condition for at least a month (23 Feb 70 to Bliss; 2 and 3 Mar 70 to Langdon; 13 May 70 to Langdon).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 Josephus N. Larned.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

4 Sale of Innocents by a bookstore for less than the standard price threatened the income of Bliss’s subscription agents. The Buffalo bookseller has not been identified.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

5 Bliss had sent at least a preliminary reply to Clemens’s 22 January request for the second quarter (1 Nov 69–31 Jan 70) royalties on Innocents. Bliss’s royalty check for $4,309.42, dated three days after this letter (NN-B), represented sales of some 23,500 copies. Total sales since publication were about 39,000; total royalties about $7,404 (Hirst 1975, 314, 316).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L4, 40–42; MTB, 1:426, excerpt; MTL, 1:169, with omissions; Hill, 191, excerpt; MTLP, 30–32.

Provenance:see Mendoza Collection in Description of Provenance. A Brownell typescript of this letter is at WU (Brownell Collection, Description of Provenance).

Emendations and textual notes:

any • [‘y’ partly formed; possibly ‘n’]

endorse, w • [deletion of comma implied; ‘w’ partly formed]

p • [partly formed]

genuine generalship • genuine genueralship

sh skirmishers • shkirmishers

bel besiege • belsiege