To Elisha Bliss, Jr.
27 January 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00568)

Buffalo, Jan. 27.

Friend Bliss:

Tell you what I’ll do, if you say so. Will write night & day & send you 200 pages of MS. every [ well week ](of the big book on California, Nevada & the Plains) & place finish it all up the 15th of April if you can without fail issue the book on the 15th of May .—putting the sketch book over till another time. For this reason: my popularity is booming, now, & we ought to take the very biggest advantage of it.

I have to go to Washington next Tuesday & stay a week, but will send you 150 MS pages before going, if you say so. It seems to me that I would much rather do this. Telegraph me now, right away—don’t wait to write. Next Wednesday I’ll meet you in N. Y—& if you can’t come there I’ll run if up & see you. 1

You could get a cord of subscriptions taken & advertising done between now & April 15. I have a splendid idea of the sagacity of this proposition.

Telegraph me right off.

Yrs

Mark

[letter docketed:] [and] Mark Twain | Jan 27/71

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Clemens left for Washington, via New York, on Tuesday, 31 January. Bliss evidently telegraphed that he would meet him in New York and Clemens responded with a telegram naming the time and place (31 Jan 71 to Bliss; p. 325). Probably among the matters they discussed was Bliss’s request that Clemens stop writing for the Galaxy, published by Isaac Sheldon and Company, and instead contribute to the American Publisher, a proposal Orion had outlined in his letter of 25 January:

Bliss says you must make Sheldon pay you $5,000 if you write another year; that he will pay you that to write for exclusively for this paper, if you will give him all your books, which he thinks you ought to do—let him do all your publishing, and just write books and for the paper. (CU-MARK)

Bliss’s offer was prompted in part by an encounter with Sheldon (see the next letter). The amount was $3,000 more than Clemens had accepted for a year’s Galaxy “Memoranda.”

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

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

Previous publication: L4, 319–320; Hill, 44, excerpt; MTLP, 54–55.

Provenance:see Mendoza Collection in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

well week • wellk [‘l’ reused as ‘e’]