25 April 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: ViU, UCCL 01079)
You know I have said all along, that I couldn’t “take the job.”1explanatory note I couldn’t take it if it amounted to three fortunes. God knows my hands are full enough already, without adding more work. I am trying to write 2 books,2explanatory note but am only succeeding in standing watch with my family, who are not very well.
If your book has been taken down in short-hand, word for word as it fell from your lips, with your imnaccuracies & peculiaritsies of speech unmarred, it is a realdable book & needs no doctoring of mine. If some literary blackmsmith has put it into fine language, no amount of doctoring can make a readable book of it.
There could be no profit or value in my “taking the job,” unless I put my name to it—& I would not put my name to any book unless I wrote every single word of the book—& created the facts into the bargain!
I have a strong curiosity to see your book, but you probably need your Manuscript. I see that it does not need my brother’s assistance; so, I think you had better run up to Hartford & see some publishers. My publisher, E. Bliss, Jr., (American Publishing Co.,) is at 116 Asylum street. Plenty other publishers there. 3explanatory note And I wish to give you a hint. They pay unknown authors 4 per cen 3 or 4 per cent royalty on the retail price of the book; they paid me 5 per cent on “Innocents Abroad,” 7½ per cent on “Roughing It,” & 10 per cent. on “Gilded Age.”4explanatory note I say this in confidence. I only tell these figures because I want you to know how to make your bargain.
If you prefer, I will send your manuscript to my publisher to look at (if you will express it to me here) & let him say what royalty he is willing to pay on it (provided he wants the book). Still, if you take it to Hartford yourself, you can see two or 3 publishers.
Now old friend, I hope you had more profitable business in the east than this book—otherwise it is a long trip foolishly thrown away. You will accomplish nothing by coming which you couldn’t have accomplished through the mails. That is to say, you would have found out that publishers are very slow to take the works of unknown men, & very close-fisted about the royalty they pay when they do take them. But no doubt you had some better business east, & I shall be heartily glad if it is so.
With the best wishes
See 18 Mar 74 to OCclick to open letter. Although Wakeman also approached travel writer J. Ross Browne for assistance, The Log of an Ancient Mariner was edited by his own daughter, Minnie Wakeman-Curtis. In her introduction, Wakeman-Curtis reprinted excerpts from Clemens’s 20 and 23 December 1866 letters to the San Francisco Alta California, in which he described Wakeman, there called “Waxman,” and recreated one of his “stunning” (not “stirring,” as Wakeman-Curtis has it) “forecastle yarns” (Wakeman-Curtis, 10–11; Twichell to SLC, 22 Aug 74, CU-MARK; SLC 1867 [MT00510], 1867 [MT00511]).
Hartford was the acknowledged center of the subscription book business in the United States, with eleven firms active at this time: the American Publishing Company and its subsidiary, the Columbian Book Company; Thomas Belknap; S. M. Betts and Company; John B. Burr and George M. Hyde; O. D. Case and Company; Charles E. Dustin, Julius S. Gilman and Company; the New England Publishing Company; S. S. Scranton and Company; Lucius Stebbins; and A. D. Worthington and Company. Eight of the firms, including Bliss’s two, were located on Asylum Street; S. M. Betts and Company and Lucius Stebbins shared the 116 Asylum Street address with Bliss, but it is not known if they were affiliated with him (Geer 1873, 27, 32, 41, 44, 48, 60, 69, 83, 105, 121, 128, 143, 212, 291, 292; 24 Mar 74 to Aldrich, n. 2click to open letter; Hamlin Hill, 3–5).
Clemens shared this royalty on The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner.
MS, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (ViU).
L6 , 119–121.
deposited at ViU by Clifton Waller Barrett on 17 December 1963.