Jan. 27-71
I wrote She[l]don to-day that protesting against a higher price than 25 cents for the pamphlet.1
Explanatory Notes
Sheldon told him it was to be a 50 cent pamphlet
& 75¢ in muslin.
Against that Bliss protests. . . . He says if you let that be
printed in muslin he will not come down on you with the contract,
but he will always feel like you hav[e]n’t
treated him right. His company enjoys the prestige of being the sole
publishers of Mark Twain, which they use with their agents, and the
advantage of this prestige they will lose if a book of yours comes
back pu out published by somebody else. He ridicules
Sheldon’s talk of expensive cuts, saying those in the
Innocents cost $60 a page—the full
page cuts. . . . Bliss is anxious that my letter should not show
any feeling on his part in regard to the Sheldon pamphlet. (CU-MARK) Clemens’s 15 July 1870 contract for Roughing It with the American Publishing Company
stipulated that he was “not to write or furnish manuscript
for any other book unless for said company during the preparation
& sale of said manuscript & book”
(Book Contract
for Roughing It). The muslin binding and the price, Bliss felt, would turn the
pamphlet into a book. Clemens’s letter, together with a
discussion he had with Sheldon in New York on 1 February, led to an
agreement by which Sheldon was to publish only seventy-five copies of
the (Burlesque) Autobiography in muslin. But
Sheldon seems not to have abided by that agreement, and the pamphlet
issued in March in both paper and cloth bindings, priced at forty and
seventy-five cents respectively, without limit on the number of cloth
copies (ET&S1, 565; “Mark Twain’s New Book,”
Galaxy 11 [Apr 71]:
verso of “Contents”; Sikes).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L4, 320–321.
Provenance:see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.
