11 March 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 00443)
lc
Confidential—for the present.
I turned the check for $4,309.45 over to Mr. Langdon yesterday—I shall not use the money for a month yet, & he will pay me f Ⓐemendation interest. I expected to want it peremptorily in February, but didn’t.1explanatory note
A first-class New York magazine wants me to edit a humorous department in it. They want ten pages a month. They offer twenty-four hundred dollars a year for the service, & then they want a publishing house there to have the privilege of issue ing the matter in book form at the end of the year in a $1.50 book (250 pp. 12mo,) & pay me a royalty of 20 per cents on each copy sold. I have just written them that you would have to have a bid in the matter.2explanatory note I also wrote that I would do the editing for $2,000 a year editing for a little trifle editing only on condition that I own the matter after use in the magazine & have the privilege of doing just what I please with it. All this had better be kept still for the present.
No—shan’t go east for a long time.
I have a sort of vague half-notion of spending the summer in England. I could write a telling book. But who we don’t like to leave our delightful nest even for a day. When Have you heard yet what the possibilities are in the matter of selling our book there?3explanatory note
P. S.—I take consider the magazine because it will give an opening for higher-class writing—stuff which I hate to shovel into a daily newspaper. Ⓐemendation
letter docketed: ✓ auth and Mark Twain | March 11/70 | Author
See 28 Jan 70 to Bliss, n. 5click to open link, and 2 and 3 Mar 70 to Langdon, n. 4click to open link.
The admonition about Bliss’s “bid” was probably in the missing portion of the previous letter. The publisher of the Galaxy was Sheldon and Company in New York.
Bliss’s reply does not survive, but could hardly have been encouraging (3 Mar 70 to Bliss, n. 2click to open link). Clemens’s thoughts of England may have been prompted by an offer from Jervis Langdon to underwrite a European trip (13 Jan 70 to OLL, n. 6click to open link).
References
- TS by anonymous compiler, CtHSD. 1974
- 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 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- AAA/Anderson. The Fine Library of the Late Mrs. Benjamin Stern, Together with Autograph Letters from the Collection[s] of William L. Clements and E. W. Evans, Jr., and Other Properties. Sale no. 4111 (9, 10, and 11 May). New York: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries. 1934
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks. Edited by Dixon Wecter. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library. 1949
- Hill, Hamlin. “Escol Sellers from Uncharted Space: A Footnote to The Gilded Age.” American Literature 34 (March): 107–13. 1962
- Hill, Hamlin, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 1867–1894. Edited by Hamlin Hill. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1967
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L4 , 90–91; AAA/Anderson 1934, lot 124, excerpt; MTMF , 128 n. 1, excerpt; McElderry, xii, excerpt; Hill, 41, excerpt; MTLP , 30, brief paraphrase.
The MS, in the collection of Edmund W. Evans of Oil City, Pennsylvania, was sold in 1934; in 1935 it was offered in another sale of several collections, including that of Mr. and Mrs. William K. Bixby of St. Louis; by 1939 it was in the collection of William T. H. Howe; in 1940, Dr. Albert A. Berg bought and donated the Howe Collection to NN-B.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.