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Add to My Citations To Oliver Wendell Holmes
3? November 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(Transcript: CU-MARK, UCCL 12099)
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The author of this book will take it as a real compliment if Mr Holmes will allow it to lumber one of his shelves.

Samuel L. Clemens
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Explanatory Notes

Add to My Citations

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1 Clemens inscribed this letter in a cloth-bound copy of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old. He probably did so on 3 November, after returning home from his 2 November breakfast in New York with Lord Houghton. The American Publishing Company sent the book by express on the same day (APC 1876). Holmes responded (CU-MARK):
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Conceivably Clemens had met with Holmes while visiting Howells—particularly since he wished Holmes to sign his copyright petition (see 18 Sept 75 to Howells)—and had promised him a copy of Sketches, New and Old. The two had previously exchanged letters in 1869, about a gift copy of The Innocents Abroad (see L3, 364–66).



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Transcript in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), typed from the original MS, which in 1989 belonged to Dorothy Goldberg.

glyphglyphPrevious publication:glyph L6, 580.

glyphglyphProvenance:glyphThe letter was inscribed in a first-edition copy of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (American Publishing Company, 1875), which remained in Holmes’s house at 296 Beacon Street, Boston, until at least the 1950s. In 1989 Dorothy Goldberg purchased it from Allen Ahearn of Quill and Brush, Bethesda, Maryland.