Марк Твен - Complete Letters of Mark Twain

Now you send me that portrait. I am sending you mine, in this letter; and am glad to do it, for it has been greatly admired. People who are judges of art, find in the execution a grandeur which has not been equalled in this country, and an expression which has not been approached in any.

Yrs truly,

S. L. Clemens .

P. S. 62,000 copies of “Roughing It” sold and delivered in 4 months.

The Clemens family did not spend the summer at Quarry Farm that year. The sea air was prescribed for Mrs. Clemens and the baby, and they went to Saybrook, Connecticut, to Fenwick Hall. Clemens wrote very little, though he seems to have planned Tom Sawyer, and perhaps made its earliest beginning, which was in dramatic form.

His mind, however, was otherwise active. He was always more or less given to inventions, and in his next letter we find a description of one which he brought to comparative perfection.

He had also conceived the idea of another book of travel, and this was his purpose of a projected trip to England.

*****

To Orion Clemens, in Hartford:

Fenwick hall, Saybrook, Conn .

Aug. 11, 1872.

My dear Bro . – I shall sail for England in the Scotia, Aug. 21.

But what I wish to put on record now, is my new invention – hence this note, which you will preserve. It is this – a self-pasting scrap-book – good enough idea if some juggling tailor does not come along and ante-date me a couple of months, as in the case of the elastic veststrap.

The nuisance of keeping a scrap-book is: 1. One never has paste or gum tragacanth handy; 2. Mucilage won’t stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3. Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4. To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome. My idea is this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps.

Lay on the gum in columns of stripes.

Each stripe of gum the length of say 20 ems, small pica, and as broad as your finger; a blank about as broad as your finger between each 2 stripes – so in wetting the paper you need not wet any more of the gum than your scrap or scraps will cover – then you may shut up the book and the leaves won’t stick together.

Preserve, also, the envelope of this letter – postmark ought to be good evidence of the date of this great humanizing and civilizing invention.

I’ll put it into Dan Slote’s hands and tell him he must send you all over America, to urge its use upon stationers and booksellers – so don’t buy into a newspaper. The name of this thing is “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook.”

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This in 1917. D.W.

"Agate,” “minion,” etc., sizes of type; “take,” a piece of work. Type measurement is by ems, meaning the width of the letter ’m’.

Mark Twain: A Biography, by same author.

Henry had returned once to the Pennsylvania to render assistance to the passengers. Later he had somehow made his way to the flatboat.

Probably 1859.

It is set down historically in Mark Twain ‘A Biography.’ Harper & brothers.

One contribution was sent to a Keokuk paper, The Gate City, and a letter written by Mrs. Jane Clemens at the time would indicate that Mark Twain’s mother did not always approve of her son’s literary efforts. She hopes that he will do better, and some time write something “that his kin will be proud of."

See Mark Twain: A Biography, by the same author; Chapter XL.

Written across the face of the last page.

The “Bill” Stewart mentioned in the preceding chapter.

See Mark Twain: A Biography, chap XLVI, and Appendix H.

Mark Twain: A Biography, chap. LXXIVL.

Redpath’s partner in the lecture lyceum.

Mrs. Fairbanks, of the Quaker City excursion.