To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
3 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00553)

llc

Buf. Jan 3.

Friend Bliss—

No, if this pamphlet1 pays, I want to is you to issue Jumping Frog illustrated, along with 2 other sketches for the holidays next year. I’ve paid high for the Frog & I want him to get his price back by himself. The Sketch Book will be good enough without him.2

Name the Sketch book “Mark Twain’s Sketches” & go on canvassing like mad. Because if you don’t hurry it will tread on the heels of the big book next August.3 In the course of a week I can have most of the matter ready for [ I ] you I think. ‸Am working like sin on it.‸

Yrs

Clemens

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance.

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2 See 17 Dec 70 to Bliss, and 22 Dec 70 to Bliss, n. 5. Clemens did not publish a Jumping Frog pamphlet in 1871, but in 1874 included the story in Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One (New York: American News Company), a paper-covered booklet. The sketchbook he was assembling at this time, which did not include the Jumping Frog, was repeatedly postponed. The contract for it was not fulfilled until 1875, with Sketches, New and Old, which included “The ‘Jumping Frog.’ In English. Then in French.” For an account of Clemens’s sketchbooks of this period, see ET&S1, 555–653.

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3 Clemens’s (still untitled) book about his western years. Roughing It was not in fact published until February 1872.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L4, 295; MTMF, 144 n. 1, brief excerpt; MTLP, 53.

Provenance:see Mendoza Collection in Description of Provenance. A handwritten transcription by Dana Ayer and a Brownell typescript are at WU (see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance).

Emendations and textual notes:

I • [partly formed]