10 January 1881 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01890)
The books which Sam sent to us supplied an eminent deficiency & were very welcome.
Ma forces me to reveal what I have concealed for a couple of months—to-wit. In October I discovered that my publisher cheated me out of a great sum of money 8 years ago; & that the same swindle would have been played upon me on my last book if it had not been for some figures & estimates which Orion made for me 8 7 years ago. If I had believed in those estimates at the time, I would be better off now, than I am, by a hundred thousand dollars. Well, I proved the correctness of his estimates, since, & based the contract for my last book upon them—whereby I saved twenty thousand dollars. So I wrote Orion that he should have the advantage of that saving—that is to say, he should have the income from that $20,000 after subtracting taxes. This gives him $75 a month as long as he lives & I prosper; & it is not my money he is receiving, but his own—& fairly & honestly earned. He needn’t blush to reeceive it. If I had listened to him long ago, I could have been giving him the income from $50,000, without missing it, all this time. However, I have swept away his past indebtedness. He owes no man a cent.—Ⓐemendationat least he owes me nothing.
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- 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
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Manuscript Letters Now in the Mark Twain Papers. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 11 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
MS, CU-MARK.
MicroML, reel 4.
See Moffett Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.