3 March 1884 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, in pencil: NPV, UCCL 02928)
If Prang’s contract says 10 per cent on the retail prices, it’s all right.
I’ve made my head sore over these dramatic calculations this morning, with the final assistance of the manager of the oOpera House, & now I have to give it up. It’s too complicated for me. So, let Mallory do the proposing, & we will try to answer. There’s one thing that is quite certain, however—we won’t have a contract for any portion of profits, the Mallorys to boss the expenses & make them what they please. I’d rather have a contract by which my share was a third or a fourth, or a fifth, after the deduction of $300 per night for expenses. That or a stipulated sum per week. In either of these cases, we could generally know how much they robbed us of. So also with your gross proceeds royalty—though it seemed to me that that was hardly enough. It may be enough; in the country, where the traveling manages & the more I study over it the more reasonable it looks. If it is one-third or one-fourth of the play’s actual profit it is enough; but I can’t imagine it to be that.
Great guns, it makes my head ache!
Call the lowest figure per week $350.
And I think that whenever you & Mallory think you have nearly reached an understanding, you’d better run up here & explain it to me. It will save a world of time.
I’ve no data to cipher on—I simply befog myself.
References
- Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
- 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
- Webster, Samuel Charles. Mark Twain, Business Man. Edited by Samuel Charles Webster. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1946
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 8 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
MS, in pencil, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Special Collections, NPV.
MTBus, 240–41, three canceled lines on MS p. 3 unpublished; MicroPUL, reel 2.
see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.