To James R. Osgood
23 July 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(Transcript and MS: CU-MARK and MH-H, UCCL 01254)

Hartford July 23

My dear Osgood:

My idea is, to let our lawyer show this to Gill & Co. & ask them to sign it for publication (either this card or another containing the substance of it—to be drafted by Howells or some other of our unfortunates)—& Gill & Co. will refuse. Then show them our remarks beginning on page 71 (or other remarks to be furnished by Howells or some one else) & tell them we shall publish the card ourselves, with all our signatures appended to the remarks.

Then you must have every aggrieved author & publisher sign it (I would rather a greater name than mine should come first in the list—seems to me it would be better) but I am not [strenuous)]—then you print it, making an agreement with all hands that we shall mutually pay the libel damages (if any—& it ain’t likely there’ll be any) out of our several pockets, each according to his financial ability.

By the way, I think Gill wrote me that Holmes & a lot more gave him permission to use copyright matter—which is probably a lie. Shall I hunt up that letter for you?2

Yrs

Clemens

[enclosure:]

A Card.

Being under the impression that unwatched (that is to say, [uncopyrighted)] literary property could be property was without protection in law, & could therefore be [siezed] under the black flag & used with impunity, we recently laid hands upon a quantity of such goods & advertised that upon a certain date we would work the same up & deliver it to the public in a series of volumes. To make these volumes complete we were necessitated to use some of the copyrighted property of the same authors we were proposing to despoil—but this we honestly intended to ask for, since we could not get it in any other way. {We as good as said this, in a letter to one of these authors— (which letter can be produced, in proof of this assertion, if required.)} But certain of these authors not only declined to give us permission to use their copyrighted matter (as did also their publishers,) but even warned us to leave their uncopyrighted property alone, & ‸also, and‸ threatened us with the heavy hand of the law if we disobeyed the warning. This had no effect upon us. We disobeyed. We published our book. But this present statement is to certify that in doing this we made a serious mistake; for the legal advisers of Messrs. J. R. Osgood ‸{here insert the rest of the names, Osgood)}‸ & Mr. Mark Twain prove ‸have‸ proved to us a thing we never had dreamed of before, to-wit: that an American author’s right of property in his writings is absolutely perfect & indestructible, even without the protection of a [ copyright.

This] fact being established to our satisfaction, we very promptly ‸necessarily‸ agreed to issue not another copy of our book with the forbidden names & matter in it. Two thousand copies of the book had already passed out of our hands, but no more will follow [until] the promised eliminations shall have been made.3

{Signed}

[three-fourths of page left blank; new page:]

We the undersigned sent the above card to Messrs. Wm. F. Gill & Co., publishers, with the request that they sign it, for publication. They have declined to do it. ‸so.‸ Why, one can not easily understand. It ‸The card‸ states simply the truth, nothing more, nothing [less. It] is purposely couched in moderate & inoffensive language. It gives to the world ‸writers & publishers‸ a piece of information of the last importance & value. And finally it g affords offered Messrs. Gill & Co an opportunity to perform an act of grace toward us whom they have ungently treated.

{Signed

However, in simple justice to Messrs. Gill & Co., & to show that we harbor no harsh feeling toward them, we willingly publish the card ourselves.

{Signed}

Samℓ. L. Clemens

(Mark Twain)

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 That is, with “We the undersigned” at 518.11.

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2 Osgood had been Holmes’s publisher since joining with James T. Fields in 1868 to form Fields, Osgood, and Company, successors to Holmes’s previous publisher, Ticknor and Fields (L5, 72–73 n. 2). In 1874, operating as James R. Osgood and Company, he issued Holmes’s Songs of Many Seasons, and in 1875 he published the twentieth edition of Holmes’s Poems. Gill almost certainly made this claim in his now lost letter of 7 June, which Clemens alluded to again in his enclosed “Card” as “a letter to one of these authors” (see 8 June 75 to Gill and 13 July 75 to Osgood, n. 1).

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3 As Clemens’s letter of 20 July to Osgood suggests, in return for agreeing to issue no additional unrevised copies of Burlesque, the first volume of his Treasure-Trove series, Gill was permitted to sell the two thousand he had already printed. No copy of the book without Clemens’s “Encounter with an Interviewer” has been found, however, nor has any published version of the proposed “Card” (see also 13 July 75 to Osgood, n. 2). Gill originally intended to publish twelve volumes in the series, but ultimately issued only four more, all in 1875: Travesty, Story, Extravaganza, and Essay (BAL, 8:19127, 19129–32).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

TS, prepared in 1943 from the original MS (owned at that time by Joseph Rosenberg), Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), is copy-text for the letter. MS, Rogers Memorial Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H), is copy-text for the enclosure.

Previous publication: L6, 516–519; Anderson Galleries 1924, lot 93, paraphrase and brief excerpts of letter only; Chicago 1936, lot 114, paraphrase and brief excerpts of letter only; MTLP, 90–91.

Provenance:The Henry M. Rogers and Kathleen Rogers Collection was donated in 1930.

Emendations and textual notes:

strenuous) • [redundant close parenthesis]

uncopyrighted) • uncopyrighted) | uncopyrighted) [rewritten for clarity]

siezed • [sic]

copyright. [¶] This • copyright. —| [¶] This

until • []ntil [torn]

less. It • less.—|It