The Formation of Samuel L. Clemens' Library

In 1879 a newspaper article about the misfortune of Dr. William Dindorf, a learned man compelled by a reversal of fortunes to sell his private library in Leipzig, caught the attention of Samuel Clemens; he clipped the story and pinned it to the rear endpaper of the notebook he was then using. This same document, Notebook 17, contains his notes for a tale about "the auction of a poor scholar’s library."¹ Appendix E of A Tramp Abroad (1880) is the apparent result: there Mark Twain relates a mock German legend concerning the threatened library of Dr. Franz Reikmann, a "venerable scholar" who "had been all his life collecting his library, book by book, and he loved it as a miser loves his hoarded gold." In the dénouement, two benevolent twin brothers—a pair of Mark Twain s recurrent mysterious strangers—intervene to rescue the books by inflating the bidding and then presenting both the library and the money to an astounded Reikmann.

That a newspaper clipping could stir such empathy within Clemens suggests the value he actually placed upon his own library. Though he certainly did not imagine himself a scholar, he nonetheless knew the thrill of procuring a long-sought-after volume. "Use with care, for it is a scarce book," he admonished on the title page of Henry H. Breen’s Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes & Defects (London, 1857) in a note penciled in 1876. "England had to be ransacked in order to get this copy—or the bookseller speaketh falsely."² In 1877 he signed and dated Edward William Lane’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights (London, 1839–41), adding, "A rare and valuable copy."³ A flyleaf in Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller (London, 1878) displays a similar inscription:

"S. L. Clemens/Munich, Bavaria,/January, 1879./A very valuable book/—& unique" (Mark Twain Library, Redding, Conn.).

Clemens’ peregrinations until 1870 evidently discouraged his book collecting impulses, however; only a few extant volumes from his libraries appear to have been owned by him before his marriage.⁴ Among those surviving are his copies of J. L. Comstock’s Elements of Geology (New York, 1851), signed in 1856 (Beinecke Library, Yale); The New Testament (New York, 1859), signed in a round, youthful hand (C. Waller Barrett Collection, Univ. of Virginia); James J. Jarves’ History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1844), used in letters Mark Twain wrote in 1866 (MTP);

and The Holy Bible (London, 1866), signed on 2 September 1867 and profusely annotated (Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin). Clemens’ desire for a permanent book collection housed in a special room is implicit in the letter he wrote to his future wife on 27 February 1869, in which he promised Livy a place for them "apart from the jangling elements of the outside world, reading & studying together when the day’s duties are done."⁵ This dream was gratified in November 1874 when the Clemenses moved into their newly-built nineteen-room house in Hartford; a large, sumptuous library was easily accessible on the first floor. At one side of the library a glass conservatory offered a view of muted sunlight and verdant foliage.

No doubt the pleasure Clemens was finding in his own library inspired his description of Francis Lightfoot Lee’s literary life in the biographical sketch Clemens produced in July 1875: Lee "was educated. He was more than that—he was finely cultivated. He loved books; he had a good library, & no place had so great a charm for him as that. . . . Over their port & walnuts he & his friends of the gentry discussed a literature which is dead & forgotten, now" (Historical Society of Pennsylvania). Nine years later Clemens and George Washington Cable, two of the foremost American men of letters of their day, talked about literature in Clemens’ library for nearly four hours one day in February 1884.⁶ There in 1886 and 1887 Clemens also conducted a Robert Browning study group for women. Mary Bushnell Cheney recalled going to Clemens’ Nook Farm residence to hear him read from Browning’s works at one of these meetings. She was particularly impressed by the book-lined room where the gatherings were held, with its "carved black oak panelling of the walls." As she gazed about her it seemed that "the place was in itself a sort of revelation of poetic meanings," especially with the nearby "flowers and filtered sunshine of the little conservatory."⁷ The elaborate Hartford house library well suited its owners, for the Clemens family venerated books. Indeed, books were the mainstay of the Nook Farm society; writing, revising, editing, publishing, reading, reviewing were interwoven through the fabric of everyday life in that community. Like Clemens, neighbors such as the Stowes and Warners depended upon the book industry for their livelihood.

A large proportion of Clemens’ library volumes were acquired between 1874 and 1877 when he and Livy first had the income and the leisure to stock their new library shelves. Commercial stickers in Clemens’ library books and extant sales receipts indicate that he bought from bookstores in Hartford, Boston, Elmira, and New York

City. Brown & Gross,⁸ booksellers at 77 Asylum Street in Hartford, billed him on 1 January 1881 for sixteen titles purchased during the preceding months; these included Albion W. Tourgee’s Bricks Without Straw, Sidney Lanier’s edition of The Boy’s King Arthur,⁹ Isa Craig Knox’s The Little Folks’ History of England, William Hamilton Gibson’s Pastoral Days, Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Young Folks’ History of the United States, August Rodney Macdonough’s translation of The Lovers of Provence, Aucassin and Nicolette, Henriette B. (Guizot) Witt’s Monsieur Guizot in Private Life, and several reference books (receipt in MTP).

Nevertheless, throughout his professional life Mark Twain disliked retail bookstores, a prejudice derived from the competition between subscription publishers, who employed canvassing agents to sell directly to customers, and the retail book trade. More than once Mark Twain was convinced that retail bookstores were surreptitiously hurting his profits as author and publisher by purchasing his books from unscrupulous agents and selling them over their counters. His disdain for the retail book trade shows through forcefully in chapter thirty-six of The Gilded Age (1873) in which Laura Hawkins upbraids an impudent bookstore clerk who recommends only sensation novels: "What a bookseller—or perhaps his clerk—knows about literature as literature, in contradistinction to its character as merchandise, would hardly be of much assistance to a person—that is, to an adult, of course—in the selection of food for the mind."¹⁰

Confident of his own literary judgment and eager to avail himself of the privileges accorded to authors by the book trade, Clemens built up his book collection mainly by ordering from publishing houses. In the nineteenth century many American publishers also functioned as wholesalers for books issued by the other publishing firms; some publishers even went so far as to fill orders for rare and out-of-print volumes as well. Therefore, Clemens was able to request books with various imprints from a single firm. He seems seldom to have paid the full retail price, either; generally he received a special author’s discount in addition to the reduced price offered by the wholesaler. Thus on 23 March 1873, Clemens simply dispatched a list of titles to an unnamed publishing firm with the note, "Please send me per express, all these books, with bill for same." He requested an author’s discount on the order (Historical Society of Pennsylvania). Frequently he ordered from Boston and New York City firms. On 16 May 1874, for instance, Estes & Lauriat, Boston publishers and booksellers, credited Clemens for payments toward Guizot’s A Popular History of France, then issuing in installments.

The same firm billed Clemens for $50.55 on 14 July 1880 after shipping twenty-one books, including Gulliver’s Travels, Dumas’ The Iron Mask, Boswell’s Johnson, Madame de Sévignés Letters, Plutarch’s Lives, and Brewer’s Phrase and Fable (receipts in MTP). In November 1877 James R. Osgood & Company of Boston billed him for nineteen titles purchased during the year, including Richard Irving Dodge’s The Plains of the Great West, The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon, Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, and Chronicles of the Crusades (receipt in Scrapbook #10, p. 69, MTP).

Clemens also levied heavily on the goodwill of his own publishers, ordering many volumes through their sales departments. This habit commenced with Elisha Bliss’s American Publishing Company; thereafter he routinely expected his successive publishers to attend to his library needs. "Yes, send me a collection of etiquette books," he replied casually to James R. Osgood on 7 March 1881—a period when he was working on the never-completed "Burlesque of Books on Etiquette" (MTHL, pp. 360 n. 2, 362). On 22 July 1882 an employee of James R. Osgood & Company, responding to another of Clemens’ requests, described and priced three editions of Thomas Carlyle’s Works which included Carlyle’s Cromwell. The same employee also sent "a lot of books relating to travels in the U.S. by English people in the first half of the century; twenty-five volumes in all. They include Mrs. Trollope, Basil Hall and Marryatt, &c., &c. Their average price is about a dollar per volume. Please return any you do not wish for" (W. Rowland to Clemens, ALS in MTP). During the years Clemens himself engaged in publishing, he often saddled Charles L. Webster and (later) Frederick J. Hall with this responsibility of book searches. In a 6 July 1884 letter, as one example, Clemens instructed Webster to send him "personal narratives of life & adventure out yonder on the Plains & in the Mountains."¹¹

While engaged in writing Following the Equator at a London address, Clemens notified Chatto & Windus on 13 November 1896 that he needed a copy of Frederick G. Aflalo’s A Sketch of the Natural History of Australia (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896) (ALS in Berg Collection, New York Public Library). Similarly, on 16 February 1902 he wrote to the general manager of Harper & Brothers, Frederick A. Duneka, to request a copy of Andrew D. White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, together with "any up-to-date books" describing "the half-dozen great sciences, by experts. Not big books, but condensations or small school-textbooks" (TS in MTP). A busy Duneka could hardly have

welcomed this task, but by then Clemens’ habit of depending on his publishers for research and library services was thoroughly ingrained.

Clemens’ antipathy toward retail bookstores did not extend to those which dealt in used books. In July 1877 Clemens entered a memorandum in Notebook 13 while in New York City: "2^d hand bookstore—get full Harper Monthly for Sue [Crane], & some miscellaneous books" (N&J, 2: 38). Related entries reveal that he intended to purchase German and French language books and a copy of The Arabian Nights. Two years later he jotted a similar entry ("Second-hand books") in Notebook 18 to remind himself of an errand in New York City (N&J, 2: 342).

However, Clemens frequented bookshops selling new retail stock wherever he traveled in Europe. When he was lonely or bored these stores provided intellectual stimulation; in one undated note he recalls a day he spent in London in the 1870s: "Nobody in town. Bought [John] Timbs—[Augustus J. C. Hare’s] Walks [in London]—[John] Stow—Leigh Hunt, & a lot of other authorities & read about a thing, then went leisurely to see it" (MTP, DV115). One of these books may have been John Heneage Jesse’s London: Its Celebrated Characters and Remarkable Places (3 vols., 1871), the flyleaf of which Clemens signed in London in 1873 (Huntington Library, San Marino).

Numerous volumes also entered his library collection as gifts acquired during his travels, especially on his world tour in 1895-96. In Sydney, Louis Becke gave him a copy of By Reef and Palm (3rd ed., 1895). In Dunedin, New Zealand, Malcolm Ross donated copies of Frederick E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (London, 1887) and other "very valuable books" (Notebook 34, TS p. 32). When Clemens left Sydney to sail for Ceylon, "H. S. Chipman gave me a great illustrated Australia," he noted in December 1895 (Notebook 36, TS p. 10). In Jeypore, "Mr. Aklom looked in, this morning, from Ajmere. . . . Brought an armful of books" (Notebook 36, TS p. 55). Meherjibhai Nosherwanji Kuka, compiler and translator of The Wit and Humour of the Persians (1894), presented Clemens with a copy in Bombay in 1896 (MTP). Indeed, Mark Twain extracted a significant portion of Following the Equator (1897) from gift books that described the geography, history, and literature of the regions he visited.

Literally hundreds of other books arrived at Mark Twain’s doorstep as unsolicited offerings from other authors. Many came from fledglings who hoped to attract praise from an established

writer. "To Mark Twain,/The First Missourian,/from Robertus Love,/one of the latest," reads a typical inscription—this one written in 1906 on the title-page of Poems All the Way from Pike (1904) (Mark Twain Library, Redding). Publishers often sent complimentary copies. John S. Phillips of McClure, Phillips & Company wrote to Clemens on 14 April 1905: "We sent you a little while ago a copy of ‘The Troll Garden’ by Miss Willa Sibert Cather. . . . We are venturing to call it to the attention of a few people, like yourself, of discernment and appreciation of the better sort of thing" (TLS in MTP). "As a rule, people don’t send me books which I can thank them for," Clemens explained to Louis Pendleton on 4 August 1888, "and so I say nothing—which looks discourteous"¹² Years later, while abroad, he emphatically instructed his business agent, Frank G. Whitmore: "I seldom want the books that are sent me by strangers" (1 October 1903, TS in MTP). Yet despite such comments—and in spite of his giving away many of these presentation copies—Clemens’ library contained a vast number of books inscribed by their authors. Many—like William Dean Howells’ A Chance Acquaintance (inscribed "To S. L. Clemens with ever so much friendship"); George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes, and Madame Delphine; Joel Chandler Harris’ Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches; Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Cloth of Gold; Irving Bacheller’s Silas Strong, Emperor of the Woods—were welcome presents from Clemens’ personal friends. Other volumes earned a place on Clemens’ bookshelves after a perusal: P. T. Barnum’s Struggles and Triumphs and Dollars and Sense, Hubert Howe Bancroft’s The Native Races of the Pacific States, Sir John Adams’ Herbartian Psychology. Some books—like James Mark Baldwin’s The Story of the Mind (1899) and a work by the American humorist Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic Enrique"), Jets and Flashes (1883)—interested Clemens initially, but later were among the hundreds of volumes he donated to the Mark Twain Library at Redding in 1908.

Clemens’ library shelves contained relatively few volumes considered "old" or "rare" in his day. As a matter of fact he scoffed at people who "collect rare books at war prices, which they don’t read, and which they wouldn’t value if a page were lacking" (Autobiographical Dictation, 12 February 1908, MTP). Although Clemens’ criteria for acquisition were practical, he did occasionally buy such rarities as the Abbotsford Edition of Sir Walter Scott’s works which he combed Edinburgh for ten days to find in 1873, and an 1860 reprint of Audubon’s folio Birds of America for which he paid

$150.¹³ Even the Audubon was used, however; George Washington Cable reported from Hartford on 13 February 1884 about a day he passed with Clemens in Hartford: "Part of the time . . . was spent in consulting Audubon to identify a strange & beautiful bird that we had seen at breakfast time from the window of the library."¹⁴ Books that would not be valuable, such as the travel volumes by Trollope, Combe, Fearon, Hall, and others which Clemens obtained in 1882 for research on English visitors to America, were then only fifty or sixty years old and did not have the "rare" status they possess today; Clemens marked passages and wrote in their margins as casually as if they were just off the presses. Clemens allowed himself one extravagance in selecting his library books, however: a significant portion of his collection consisted of copiously illustrated works, particularly Gustave Doré’s editions of such literary classics as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

To avoid losing books from his own library (and as though to leave behind a permanent record of his collection), Clemens saw to it that his own name or that of a family member appeared in volumes belonging to his household. Somewhat surprisingly—considering his preference for custom-made notebooks and his experimentation with printing methods and products—Clemens made no use of bookplates, at least in the nearly seven hundred volumes known to survive from his library. (Reports of bookplates turn out to be misinterpretations of sale labels from the auctions of 1911 and 1951, pasted on inner front covers of volumes to authenticate their provenance.) Instead, Clemens preferred to sign the books he acquired, often providing the location, date, and donor. His inscription in Moritz Busch’s Bismarck in the Franco-German War specifies:

"SL. Clemens/Dec. Xmas, 1879./From S. E. Moffett." That in Richard Henry Dana’s To Cuba and Back is likewise typical: "Saml. L. Clemens/Hartford 1876." In 1876 he began sometimes signing his initials instead of the abbreviated form of Samuel Langhorne ("Saml. L.") he had previously employed; by 1877, "S. L. Clemens" had become the customary form of his signature in books. "S. L. Clemens./1895./From J. Henry Harper," he wrote routinely in the second volume of Memoirs of Barras, Member of the Directorate. In the final decade of his life he tended to omit the first period, linking the first two initials together as in the "SL. Clemens/1906" which appears in Alleyne Ireland’s The Far Eastern Tropics, or else merely signing his last name, like the "Clemens/1902" form he scrawled carelessly in Marshall M. Kirkman’s The Romance of Gilbert Holmes, An Historical Novel.

Clemens frequently inscribed the names of his wife or children in their books; evidently he was more concerned with establishing ownership than the rest of his family. He commenced this habit within a few years of his marriage: a copy of Alan Grant’s Love in Letters, Illustrated in the Correspondence of Eminent Persons contains an inscription ("Livy Clemens/1872") in Clemens’ hand. Occasionally he expanded his inscription, as he did in the copy of The Holy Bible (London, 1866) he took with him on the Quaker City excursion; "Saml. Clemens. /Constantinople,/ Sept. 2, 1867. Please return this book to stateroom No. 10, in case you happen to borrow it," he wrote somewhat accusingly on the flyleaf opposite the title page (Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin). Clemens’ signatures appear most frequently on the front free endpapers or (especially after 1900) on the front pastedown endpapers. Occasionally he signed one of the flyleaves, the half-title page, or the verso of a frontispiece portrait leaf. Although exceptions occurred, he characteristically used pencils to sign his acquisitions during the 1870s and earlier; thereafter he generally signed with ink—violet, blue, brown, or black. He increasingly employed black ink in the post-1900 period. Clemens virtually never signed his pseudonym in books belonging to his personal library, reserving "Mark Twain" for autographing the books he wrote himself. These minor bibliographical facts become crucial in detecting forgeries. Libraries and private collections in the United States and Canada already possess at least half a dozen spurious association copies.

Upon departing with his family for Europe, Clemens mentioned to an unidentified correspondent, possibly Charles Dudley Warner, that by 20 March 1878 his family’s books and furniture had been placed in a storage warehouse "for two or three years" (Buffalo Public Library). During their years abroad the Clemenses purchased numerous foreign language books—especially German novels. Livy’s account ledger for their European tour of 1878 and 1879 (MTP) records numerous expenditures in bookstores; buying books for themselves and their relatives was one of their chief pastimes on the Continent. Clemens wasn’t always pleased with the books he purchased. Though he had complained to Thomas Bailey Aldrich on 24 March 1874 about the "wretched paper & vile engravings" used in American subscription volumes (Houghton Library, Harvard), in Europe he learned to value the bulky American subscription tomes with leather bindings and thick paper. He was disgusted to discover that "German books fall to pieces when you open them" (N&J, 2:

292). Nevertheless he obtained copies of works by Gottfried Keller,

Johanna Kinkel, Elisabeth Bürstenbinder, Adelbert von Chamisso, Paul von Heyse, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and other writers. Upon his return to Hartford, Clemens promptly had the German-language volumes (currently in the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley) rebound in uniform three-quarters morocco covers by Case, Lockwood & Brainard, a local bookbindery; Yankee craftsmanship repaired the shoddy products of the German book industry.

Clemens derived profound enjoyment from his library room during the 1880s, and he was solicitous about its condition. On 25 October 1884 he reminded himself to "fix damp place in library shelves" (Notebook 23, TS p. 8, MTP). As his daughters matured he and Livy encouraged them to choose and read books from the library. Clemens and his wife had read to the girls almost daily when they were children, and now they hoped that Susy, Clara, and Jean would take as much pleasure in the serenity of the library room as their parents did. On 16 July 1889 Clemens wrote to Susy: "For forty years Macaulay’s England has been a fascinator of mine, from the stately opening sentence to the massacre at Glencoe. I am glad you are reading it. And I hope it is aloud, to Mamma."’⁵

Unfortunately, however, Clemens’ personal library shared the vicissitudes of his financial fortunes. He never was compelled to auction off its contents like the hapless Franz Reikmann of A Tramp Abroad (though he probably feared it might come to that), but as his financial stability melted away in the mid-nineties he lost access to his books. Clemens and his family left their Hartford home in the summer of 1891 to begin searching for climates and treatments which would benefit the health of Livy and Jean. They also hoped to devise a style of living that would ease their yearly expenses. They never returned to live in the Hartford house. Clemens’ books were evidently still in Hartford when he began his round-the-world lecture tour in 1895. Very likely Clemens thought about arranging for his books to rejoin him in London at the conclusion of his tour in 1896; there he attempted to establish a quasi-permanent home. But he wrote to T. S. Frisbie from Vienna on 25 October 1897: "Never mind the bookcase—I haven’t any books now anymore" (Lehigh Univ.). At the turn of the century he took up residence in New York City, and he definitely had regained physical possession of his books by 1901 when he and his family settled in a rented mansion in Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, New York.

Livy’s health began to deteriorate, however, and when her doctors recommended that the family relocate in Italy in 1903, Clemens, no doubt realizing that he could never again recreate the atmosphere

of the library room in the Hartford house, gave up his efforts to maintain the collection intact. On 25 July 1903 he mentioned to Howells that he had contributed a portion of his library to a local institution: "All our books are packed & gone into storage for Italy. . . . We sent a couple of bushels to the little Riverdale library" (MTHL, p. 773). The whereabouts of this donation is not now known.

He soon longed for his books. The book collection he found in the Villa di Quarto near Florence, which he rented from the Countess Massiglia, offended his sense of nomenclature. One day in January 1904 he set aside a portion of his Autobiographical Dictation (MTP) to berate the scarcity of reading matter in the room the Countess grandly designated as her "library." Its sole qualification for the name, he sneered, was a lonely glass-fronted bookcase containing four shelves of miscellaneous volumes, three-quarters of which were bound volumes of Blackwood and books about Christian Science and spiritualism.

When his sister-in-law Mollie Clemens died in 1904 (Orion had died in 1897), Clemens specifically reserved for himself only two books from her estate—his father’s copy of Nicholson’s Encyclopedia and his mother’s favorite Bible—and then requested other books only if Mollie’s relatives in Keokuk did not want them. To Susan Crane he wrote from Florence on 15 February 1904: "I have selected from Orion’s library 175 or 200 books & requested that they be shipped to you. . . . You can put the boxes in my study or in the barn" (MIP). Thus Clemens’ library in the end contained a number of books from his brother’s library, possibly ones he had read or glanced through previously in Orion’s home.

After Livy Clemens died in 1904, Clemens returned to America. Isabel V. Lyon, the secretary who had joined his household staff in 1902, took on the duties of unofficial librarian for her employer-stocking his bookshelves, suggesting titles for his reading and acquisition, selecting promising works from among the new books sent to him. It was Miss Lyon who took Richard Le Gallienne’s Painted Shadows (1904) to Clemens’ bedroom on 6 January 1905 and recorded his comment that this was an "ever so charming" book by "an able cuss who writes deliciously" (Isabel Lyon’s Journals, TS pp. 36, 77, MTP; Isabel Lyon to Mrs. Franklin Whitmore, 8 January 1905, ALS in MTM). She assumed these responsibilities as a matter of course because she was also Clemens’ rapt audience when he read aloud passages from his day’s reading. Some idea of how carefully she performed her chores in this line can be gained from her

private journal entries following Clemens’ move from 21 Fifth Avenue in New York City. On Monday, 2 January 1905, she remarked:

"Much of today has been spent in trying to find places for the books that are scattered—piled—on the library floor" (MTP, TS p. 34). Another entry on the next Wednesday noted that "I have spent many hours working among the books collected from many quarters of the world." Two years later, on 13 July 1907, she recorded that she occasionally busied herself in "dusting books in the Library" (TS p. 262).

Shortly before Clemens moved into Stormfield, his Italianate villa-style mansion near Redding, Connecticut, he parted with a significant portion of his library. The "four or five hundred old books" he donated to the Mark Twain Library at Redding in June 1908 included numerous volumes signed and annotated by Clemens, his wife, and his children. Possibly he wished to unburden himself of these reminders of Livy and Susy and their Hartford home. Isabel Lyon recorded the fact that she began unpacking Clemens’ books at his new home on 29 August 1908 (IVL Journal, TS p. 329, MTP). The approximately one thousand volumes which then remained for her to place on the shelves in his Stormfield library (minus a few that Clemens or Jean later removed for additional donations to the community library) were essentially those that composed Clemens’ private library at the time of his death in 1910.¹⁶

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

NOTES

    ¹Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, eds. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), II: 276–77. Hereafter both this book and volume one (edited by Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson) are referred to as N&J.
   ²Volume in the Mark Twain Papers, University of California, Berkeley—hereafter cited as "MTP." The Editor of that collection, Frederick Anderson, kindly read a draft of this article and suggested revisions.
   ^3"Books from the Library of Mark Twain . . . Purchased at the Sale of the Library of His Daughter Clara Clemens Samossoud," Zeitlin & ver Brugge, Booksellers, List No. 132 (May 1951), Los Angeles, California, item #29.
   ⁴I have compiled an annotated catalog of Clemens’ library books in "The Library and Reading of Samuel L. Clemens," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1974. Henry Nash Smith directed this research.
   ⁵The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 70.
   ⁶Mark Twain-Howells Letters, eds. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 471. Hereafter referred to as MTHL.
   ⁷"Mark Twain as a Reader," Harper’s Weekly, 55 (7 January 1911), 6.

    ⁸Israel Witkower became proprietor of the successor to this firm in the second quarter of the twentieth century. This fact explains why Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt—The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1952), pp. 243-44—reports that Clemens was one of the "regular customers" of Israel Witkower’s bookstore in Hartford.
   ⁹The Boy’s King Arthur; Being Sir Thomas Malory’s History of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, ed. Sidney Lanier; illus. Alfred Kappes (New York: Scribner’s, 1880). Clemens’ introduction to Malory’s heroes of the Round Table seemingly took place with this children’s book, a previously overlooked source for A Connecticut Yankee (1889). On 18 November 1880 someone in the Clemens household purchased "1 Boys King Arthur" for $2.40. according to the bill sent on 1 January 1881 by Brown & Gross of Hartford. The same statement also records another purchase on 13 December 1880 of "1 Boys King Arthur," again for $2.40. Perhaps the latter was intended as a Christmas gift. These acquisitions contradict the commonly held assumption that George Washington Cable first introduced Clemens to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in a Rochester bookstore during the autumn of 1884—a story set down by Clemens in 1889 (Notebook 23, TS p. 11, MTP) and repeated by Cable in 1910 (Arlin Turner, Mark Twain and George W. Cable [East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1960], pp. 135-36).
   ¹⁰Bryant Morey French—Mark Twain and the Gilded Age (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1965), p. 62—lists chapter 36 among those written by Mark Twain without Charles Dudley Warner’s collaboration.
   ¹¹Mark Twain, Business Man, ed. Samuel Charles Webster (Boston: Little Brown, 1946), p.265.
   ¹²Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper, 1917), p. 497—subsequently cited as MTL.
   ¹³Clemens to Mrs. Jervis Langdon, 2 August 1873, ALS, Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford, Conn.; receipt for Audubon volumes (dated 25 August 1880) is in MTP.
   ¹⁴Quoted in Mark Twain and George w. Cable, p. 32.
   ¹⁵TS in MTP, copyright © 1976 by the Mark Twain Company. Clemens was insistent about the advantages of interpreting literature orally; see my article," ‘It Is Unsatisfactory to Read to One’s Self’: Mark Twain’s Informal Readings," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 62 (February 1976), 22–30.
   ¹⁶I describe their subsequent fate in "The Dispersal of Samuel L. Clemens’ Library Books," Resources for American Literary Study, 5 (Autumn 1975), 147–65.