The proposed pamphlet of shah letters to the New York Herald (see 7 July 73 to Blissclick to open link).

Although Clemens expected The Gilded Age to be published in Great Britain before his planned departure date of 25 October (see the next letter), Bliss had not yet forwarded any proofsheets for the English typesetters to work from. Clemens’s contract with the Routledges guaranteed them typesetting copy at least three weeks before publication of the American edition (Contract for the Routledge Gilded Age click to open link). The first salesmen’s prospectuses, comprising pages from the first fifteen chapters, came from the American Publishing Company bindery on 7 October, suggesting that proofsheets of those pages could have arrived in England at about that time. The cost of composition was entered in the Routledge ledger on 9 December, the probable date of completion of the English typesetting (APC, 95; Routledge Ledger Book 4:765, Routledge). Preliminary collations show that like the American edition, the bulk of the English edition incorporated revisions which Warner made in the manuscript after Clemens left for England in May, or on the early proofsheets, and which were then transmitted in the late proofsheets sent to England (13 May 73 to Warnerclick to open link). In the last nine chapters, however, the English edition accords more closely with the manuscript (only a fraction of which is extant), which suggests that Bliss was forced to forward unrevised proofs to speed up the production process. (An alternate—but less likely—possibility is that these late chapters were set from a fair copy of the manuscript, which of course also lacked Warner’s revisions.) This procedure enabled the English publishers to issue their edition slightly before the American one, as required to secure a valid copyright (see Hill 1965).