6 September 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (Transcript and MS: WU and CLjC, UCCL 01124)
His claim is a distinction without a difference. If the English idea had been already known to our Patent officers, he never would have been granted a patent. The English plan is worth two of it anyway.
Ordinarily I would be willing to chance something maybe, on this thing but I can’t, this year, for our house is costing three times as much as we had intended it should, & Ⓐemendation so I naturally don’t feel able to speculate in anything. Your idea is the only sound one—to get it adopted by the government. If he would give the refusal for a year at a stipulated price, it would be worth while to tackle the government—but to buy it & then do the tackling would be bad wisdom.
I could suggest an improvement on this invention that would make Mr Fletcher feel mighty bad. But we’ll be in New York from the 10th to the 15th (at the St Nicholas doubtless) & then we’ll talk.
Warm regards to you & yours
Frank Fuller Esq | 55 Liberty st. | New York postmarked: elmira n. y. sep 7 ◇◇◇ Ⓐemendation docketed by Fuller: Mark Twain
Fuller had written twice—on 21 August and on 3 September—since receiving Clemens’s letter of 8–10 July. In the first letter, he offered an investment opportunity (CU-MARK):
Clemens was “a member of the Govment” briefly in late 1867, when he acted as secretary for Senator Stewart of Nevada. In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,” published in the New York Tribune on 27 December 1867, he claimed that the secretary of the treasury had called him an ass for suggesting that “a few conundrums distributed around through his Treasury report would help the sale of it” (SLC 1867; L2 , 109–10 n. 2, 112, 139 n. 4). The creator of Fuller’s “letter envelope,” Addison C. Fletcher of New York City, had received United States patent number 127,330 on 28 May 1872 for his invention, a “letter-sheet blank, having its inner fold cut away or punctured at its end so that mucilage or other adhesive material applied to the corners of the outer fold or flap will seal both folds and the back together at one operation” (Official Gazette, 1:539). Fuller wanted Clemens to persuade his Hartford friend Marshall Jewell, former three-term governor of Connecticut, minister to Russia, and since 3 July the United States postmaster general appointee, to officially adopt it (L4, 396 n. 1; “The Postmaster Generalship,” New York Times, 4 July 74, 4). Clemens declined the offer, in a letter not known to survive, before 3 September, when Fuller wrote again. This time Fuller used one of Fletcher’s blanks and enclosed a letter, now lost, in which Fletcher, who was not coming easily to terms, apparently claimed his invention’s distinction from its English counterpart (CU-MARK):
The “certain Brooklyn party” has not been identified.
References
- Madison Memorial Union Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- The James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, California. The collection of the Copley Library was sold in a series of auctions at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2010 and 2011.
- 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 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation.” New York Tribune, 27 December, 2. 1867
- 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
Transcript, handwritten by Dana S. Ayer during the late 1890s or later, in the Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU). MS, James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, California (CLjC), is copy-text for the envelope.
L6 , 228–230.
see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance. The Ayer transcription was copied by a typist, and this typed transcription is also at WU. CLjC purchased the envelope in July 1966 as part of a Fuller collection; at that time it was paired with the MS for 24 Sept 68 to Fuller (UCCL 02753).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.