18 June 1873 • London, England (MS: NN-B, UCCL 00928)
Private.
Have begun to write about the Shah to N. Y. Herald—don’t want them copyrighted.
You siezeⒶemendation them as they appear, & turn them into a 25 cent pamphlet (my royalty 10 per cent) & spread them over the land your own way, but be quick! Don’t let it get cold before you are out. I suggest that you disseminate them by means of the news companies.1explanatory note
letter docketed: ✓ M. T.
On 18 June Clemens wrote his first letter for the New York Herald, in which he described his trip to Ostend on 17 June, his overnight stay there, and his return on H.M.S. Lively, together with several of the shah’s family members and retainers and some half-dozen fellow journalists, most of whom had accompanied the shah on the train from Brussels to Ostend (SLC 1873). News companies were distributors of magazines and cheap paper-covered books, which they sold to the public primarily at newsstands and railroad stations. In 1867 Charles Henry Webb named the “AMERICAN NEWS CO., AGENTS”—one of the largest of these companies, located in New York—on the title page of the Jumping Frog book. And in 1874 Clemens published a small pamphlet, Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One, which was printed in Hartford but distributed through the American News Company (Tebbel, 106, 353, 393; Shove, 23, 32, 61).
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L5 , 384–385.
NN-B acquired the MS in 1970. It is laid in a copy of The Innocents Abroad, in the Autograph Edition of The Writings of Mark Twain (American Publishing Company, 1899–1907), signed “Julia S. Field (Mrs. Eugene Field).”