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To
Henry M. Crane
21 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: ViU, UCCL
00353)
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morning express $10 per annum.
office of the express printing company
evening
express $8 per annum.
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no. 14 east swan
street.
weekly express $1.50 per annum.
buffalo, Sept 21 18 69.
Friend Crane—
Now you have got the thing straight &
pleasant—therefore I have enclosed your letter to my Boston agent,
Red & he will reply to you.1 He & Medbery appear to be in a tangle, somehow,
& so but I guess they will get straightened out
shortly.2
Yrs Truly
Clemens.
[letter docketed:] Mark
Twain | 1869
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1
Crane and Henry Abbey had apparently ended their competition to schedule
a lecture by Clemens (see
21 Aug 69 to Abbey, and
21 Aug 69,
3 Sept
69, and
8 Sept 69 to Crane). Clemens lectured in Rondout, New York,
for Crane, on 12 January 1870.
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2
James Knowles Medbery (1838–73) was a New York journalist who
worked on the
Round Table, the
Evening Mail, the
Evening Post, and
from 1869 to 1871 was the literary editor of the
Christian Union. “In 1866 he established the
[American
] Literary Bureau at New York.
This comprised the first lecture bureau, in this country, which
combined the promotion of literary lecturers with the examining and
editing of various publications—articles for
magazines, etc.” (
MacKaye, 1:113, 114). In fact, the
bureau’s “Authors’
Department” functioned as a complete literary agency,
soliciting manuscripts, negotiating contracts, and supervising
publication (
American Literary Bureau, 12). Medbery evidently
was the agent who approached Clemens in the spring of 1869 (see
10 May 69 to
Redpath, p. 216). Presumably his
“tangle” with James Redpath, Clemens’s
Boston-based agent, was the result of the American Literary
Bureau’s claim to represent Clemens. As late as 20 November
1869, the bureau was advertising itself to “Lecture
Committees throughout the country” as Mark Twain’s
agent (“Lectures and Meetings,” New York
Tribune, 20 Nov 69, 5).
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MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
(
ViU).
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Previous publication:
L3, 353; Collector (May 1949), lot I 950,
excerpt.
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Provenance:
sold by Walter R. Benjamin Autographs in 1949; deposited at ViU by Clifton
Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.