2 August 1870 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: OCi, UCCL 00494)
You know I already had an offer o of ten per cent from those same parties in my pocket when I stipulated for 7½ with you. I simply promised to give them a chance to bid,; I never said I would publish with them if theirs was the best bid. If their first offer had been 12½ I would Ⓐemendationmerely have asked you to climb along up as near that figure as you could & make money, but I wouldn’t have asked anything more. Whenever you said that you had got up to what was a fair divide between us (there being no risk, now, in publishing for me, while there was, before,) I should have closed with you on those terms. I never have had the slightest idea of publishing with anybody but you. (I was careful to make no promises to those folks about their bid.)1explanatory note
You see you can’t get it out of your head that I am a sort of a rascal, a Ⓐemendationbut I ain’t. I can stick to you just as long as you can stick to me, & give you odds. I made that contract with all my senses about me, & it suits me & I am satisfied with it.2explanatory note If I get only half a chance I will write a book that will sell like fury provided you put pictures enough in it.
Yes, we’ll put the portrait in the new book.3explanatory note
Say—when does Franks Ⓐemendationwedding come off?4explanatory note
Ask Frank when if he is going to get up the annual account of sales for me which you spoke of?5explanatory note
We still sit up with Mr. L. He is somewhat worse again.
letter docketed: ✓ and Mark Twain | Aug 2/70
Bliss’s erstwhile competitor may have been Appleton and Company, although their proposal to Clemens in May was for a much slighter book than he had promised Bliss on 15 July (20 May 70 to Blissclick to open link; 15 July 70 to OCclick to open link).
Clemens’s dissatisfaction with the contract, especially with the royalty it stipulated, emerged just months after Roughing It was published in 1872 (see RI 1993 , 877–80).
References
- Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Cincinnati, Ohio. [MARC: OC.]
- 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
- 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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Roughing It. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Edgar Marquess Branch, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning. The Works of Mark Twain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. This edition supersedes the one published in 1972. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1993
MS, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Cincinnati (OCi).
L4 , 179; MTLP , 37.