1 Neither the enclosed letter, nor Bliss’s reply to it, has been found. The book the unidentified Canadian firm wished to issue doubtless was Sketches, New and Old. Bliss presumably declined permission for the proposed edition, which inevitably would have found its way into the United States and taken sales away from the American Publishing Company volume. The first Canadian edition of the sketchbook, entitled Sketches by Mark Twain, was an 1879 piracy issued by Belfords, Clarke and Company of Chicago and Toronto, and by its affiliate, Belford and Company of Toronto. It sold for $.30 in paperback and $1.00 in cloth (Roper, 57).

2 Bliss could not provide such a statement because, as Clemens should have known, the American Publishing Company did not own the Canadian distribution rights to all three of his books it had published to date. George Routledge and Sons, publishers of the authorized English editions of Roughing It and The Gilded Age, held Imperial copyright on those books, entitling them to exclusive distribution rights in Canada. The surviving bindery records for The Innocents Abroad, the only book that Bliss could legally sell in Canada, do not distinguish between sales there and in the United States (SLC 1869, 1872, 1874; L5, 638; Roper, 38–41).