Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Frank Fuller
15 August 1868 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: CLjC, UCCL 02744)

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‸ ☞Don’t make a d—d mistake, now, & send both these letters to Dubuque.
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148 Asylum st.1
[ Hartfd 000 000]

}

Dear Fuller,

You old fool. Why don’t you publish your private letters in book form? They would take like everything. Write me a humorous lecture on California, as soon as you [can. Or ]if you will furnish the humor, I will get up the statistics.

Bully for you and Clapp.2

Those societies out there can’t afford to pay much, & I have been thinking it would be well to get in with them by means of low prices now, & then charge them heavy next season. But you know more about business than I do. If you think well of what I have said in the enclosed letter, mail it—if not, don’t.3 I expect to arrive in New York (at the Everett House, Union Square,)4 two days hence (viz. Monday, 17.th.) Then I’ll talk to you. A Pittsburgh society offers me $100 to preach in November—open their course for them.5

Speaking of “courses,”6 I have mine, now. Please forward one dozen Odorless Rubber Cundrums—I don’t mind them being odorless—I can supply the odor myself. I would like to have your picture on them.7

Yrs

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The address of the American Publishing Company. The meaning of the zeros following “Hartfd” remains unknown: see the textual commentary for this letter.

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2 Possibly Henry Clapp, Jr., whose New York Saturday Press had published “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in November 1865, and who was now on the staff of De Witt Van Buren’s New York Leader, a weekly (Wilkins, 310; Rowell, 73). The reason for Clemens’s congratulations has not been discovered.

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3 The enclosed letter has not been found, but it was almost certainly addressed to G. L. Torbert of Dubuque, secretary of the Associated Western Literary Societies. Torbert’s organization had evidently repeated its offer of November 1867 to sponsor a lecture tour for Clemens (see 24 Nov 67 to Fuller; see Clemens’s 1868 lecture-tour schedule).

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4 A small but fashionable residential hotel on the north side of Union Square at Seventeenth Street (Morris, 110; Browne, 397).

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5 Clemens lectured in Pittsburgh, for a $100 fee, on 19 November (see 20 Nov 68 to JLC and family).

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6 Menstruation.

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7 Fuller was now co-owner, with George H. Munroe, of a New York rubber-goods business, which evidently produced condoms, among other items. The rubber was “odorless” because it contained very little sulfur (Wilson 1868, 384, 789; note by Fuller on the verso of 24 Sept 68 to Fuller). Clemens told his readers in an Alta letter dated 22 October: “Frank Fuller, ex-Acting Governor of Utah, is located at 19 Park place, New York, and is making money hand over fist in the manufacture and sale of a patent odorless India rubber cloth, which is coming greatly into fashion for buggy-tops and such things” (SLC 1868).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, The James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, Calif. (CLjC, call no. 2420).

glyph Previous publication: L2, 240–241.

glyph Provenance: CLjC acquired this letter in July 1966, as part of a larger Fuller collection. At the time of acquisition, a note by Fuller, probably written in the 1890s or even later, accompanied the letter: “Probably I covered something here not adapted to general reading. I think the above was written to indicate the date of his speech on The Weather which I know much about. [in ink:] I walked with him through Union Square just before sunset 3 hours before that speech.” Since Clemens gave his “weather” speech on 22 December 1876 to the New England Society of New York, at Delmonico’s restaurant, Fuller’s description is either mistaken, or intended for some other letter, now lost.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

Hartfd 000 000 • [This reading of the MS is doubtful because the meaning of the six characters represented here as zeroes is not known. Despite some appearance to the contrary, these “zeroes” are not superscript and in fact rest on horizontal rules present in the MS but not visible in the following illustration.]

can. Or • can.— |Or