Elmira, June 24
Friend Bliss:
I am ready for the proofs, now, & shall be still better ready a week or ten days hence.
I hope those pictures have gone to Conway as no doubt they have.1
I have been [thinking], & have arrived at the [conclusion] that if the Company will sell out two-thirds of its copyrights & [electrotypes], & also its printing office & presses, by auction, & move back into the cheap quarters again & publish about one or two books at a time, it can declare some more dividends. I will lay the matter by letter before the other directors.2 They may object, but I hope not, for I think that the present extended business is a considerable detriment to my pocket. I think we publish books so fast that canvassers are likely to merely skim the cream of a district & then “lay” for the next new book. This is only human nature, & they are not to be blamed for it. I know you think differently from me; & perhaps we are both partly right & partly wrong. We will take the sense of the directors, & I shall have to abide by their decision, though I shall be mighty sorry to see Tom Sawyer issue when any other book of the firm is either being canvassed or within four ‸six‸ months of being canvassed.
If the directors will cut the business down two-thirds, & the expenses one half, I think it will be an advantage to all concerned, & I feel persuaded that I shall sell more books.3
Please ask Frank to give me my July statement as promptly as he can conveniently, for I have a great curiosity to know what it is going to be.4 He
Yrs
S L Clemens
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Bliss had not yet sent electrotypes of the
Tom Sawyer
illustrations to Moncure Conway. As of 9 April Clemens had seen proofsheets of only the first two chapters; the batch he received in mid-July may have been the next one that he received (see 4 July 1876 to
Conway, n. 2, and 22 July 1876 to Bliss, n.
1).
Clemens was a stockholder and a director of the American Publishing Company from 1873 until 1881. It is not known if
the company had issued any dividends since the last one he received, on 1 April 1874 (24 Mar 1874 to Aldrich, L6, 92 n. 8).
For Bliss’s response to these proposals, see 22 July 1876 to Bliss, n. 1.
On 1 July Frank Bliss sent a statement for the second quarter of 1876,
showing that Clemens was due $48.92 on sales of 276 copies of
The Innocents Abroad
(1869), $72.97 on 278 copies of
Roughing It
(1872), $46.95 on 260 copies of
The Gilded Age
(1873-74, the same amount went to coauthor Charles Dudley Warner), and
$590.85 on 2,506 copies of
Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old
(1875), for a total of $759.69. On 20 July, after deducting $13.31 for “items
chg’d to you,” Bliss sent him a check for $746.38 (Scrapbook 10:31, CU-MARK; Bliss to SLC, 20 July
1876, CU-MARK). This payment,
even less than the disappointing first-quarter return (see 12
April 1876 to Bliss, n. 1), must have given further impetus to the dissatisfaction with the American Publishing
Company expressed here and in the following letter (UCCL 01346) and again in the letter of 22 July to Elisha
Bliss.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MTLP, 99.
Provenance:
Donated to CtY in 1942 by Walter F. Frear.
Emendations and textual notes:
thinking • thin | thinking [rewritten for clarity]
conclusion • conclu- || sio sion [corrected miswriting]
electrotypes • electro | types
