2 December 1867 • Washington, D.C. (MS: PBL, UCCL 00167)
I want you to r write my next lecture. You can do it better than I.
Keep California in your mind—2 lectures—both repeated in San Francisco—delivered Ⓐemendationonce each in Sac. & Va. City—not elsewhere. I know. I have been there. The other Ⓐemendationplaces are not worth $20 apiece hardly, when you average them. Va. isn’t very good, for the Alta copy-righted the letters & the Enterprise couldn’t publish.1explanatory note Next
The American Publishing Co. of Hartford want a book. They published for Richardson. I have written them to state just what they want, when they want it, & how much bucksheesh? That was business, wasn’t it? I thought so. Their house is a very live concern.
If you know of any villainy here that has money in it, let me know.
On 12 August 1867, Frederick MacCrellish and Company registered its copyright for “The Holy Land Excursion | Mark Twains Letters” (DLC). This unusual step was probably effective in discouraging the Alta’s exchanges from reprinting all of Clemens’s letters, even though many reprinted selections from them: the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the San Rafael (Calif.) Marin County Journal, the San Francisco California Weekly Mercury, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Sacramento Union, to name only a few.
References
- Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 2: 1867–1868. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Richard Bucci, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1990
- United States Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
MS, Robert B. Honeyman Collection, Linderman Library, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa. (PBL).
L2 , 124.
The Honeyman Collection, which contains eleven Clemens letters written between 1867 and 1897, was deposited at PBL in March 1957. See also Brownell Collection, pp. 509–11.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.