8 April 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NBuU-PO, UCCL 01219)
First—Bliss has never made a single reflection upon you in my hearing—not one.
Next—as to advising. I could have advised you, but you come so late. All I can advise now, is, do not go to law until you have tried all other ways & failed—& then don’t—because you’ve nothing to fight with but a mere verbal contract, & that is the weakest of all weak weapons. If you had only come sooner I could have given you priceless advice, viz.,—Never make a verbal contract with any man. Under a written contract the author gets his money & his account of sales regularly, & there is no suspicion & no bad blood. Well, no serious bad blood, at any rate. There’s always a remedy. But under a verbal one the author has none. You have none. None in the world. You can get a shyster of a lawyer to take your case—& loose it for you—at your expense. But a reputable lawyer will advise you to keep out of the law, make the best of a foolish bargain, & not get caught again.
I may not be much of a comforter, but I’m doing the best I can, when I advise you to worry through on friendly terms with the publisher & not go from the frying pan into the fire by appealing to the law & almost inevitable defeat. My contract on “Roughing It” was strongly drawn; but when 90,000 copies had been sold I came to the conclusion that an assertion of Bliss’s which had induced me to submit to a lower royalty than t I had at first demanded, was an untruth. I was going to law about it; written upside down in gray ink Male Child 2explanatory note but after my lawyer (an old personal friend & the best lawyer in Hartford) had heard me through, he remarked that Bliss’s assertion being only verbal & not a part of a written understanding, my case was weak—so he advised me to leave the law alone——& charged me $250 for it.3explanatory note
I know how impulsive & belligerent your spirit w Ⓐemendation used to be before you performed the wisest act of your life at the marriage altear;4explanatory note but as you have altered since then, I feel safe in suggesting that you consider well before you quarrel & appeal to the law. I don’t know anything about the Columbian Co., but if Bliss is bossing it I am perfectly satisfied that your account of sales has been correctly rendered.5explanatory note It is a mighty tough year for books. The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It, both put together, have not paid me much over $3,000 in the past 12 months. They are old books, they have never had a black eye; I have not lost in reputation—consequently the serious falling off can be reasonably attributed to nothing but the prevailing business prostration. But I think that the next 3 months will show a different state of things. , with my books & yours too. ThereforeⒶemendation 6explanatory note Therefore I am venturing to bring out a new book7explanatory note—a thing I could not have been hired to do during any part of the past 12 months, for it would have been a sort of deliberate literary suicide.
So I’ve become Samℓ. F. Clemens to your waning memory! I’ll just address this brief note to G. R. Webb, & see how you like it to have your name coldly mutilated!
over
P. S. It’s a pretty long letter, & I proposed to mark out all the surplusage but found it too much trouble.
We’ve the diphtheria in the house & can’t fool away much time in graceful & perspicuous composition.8explanatory note
Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):
Webb addressed the envelope to “Saml F. Clemens Esq | Hartford | Conn. | ℅ | Mr. Twain,” and on it Clemens noted:
From Webb. (Mem—“The whirligig of time brings round its revenges.”)
He ve swindled me on a verbal publishing contract on my first book (Sketches), (8 years ago) & now he has got caught himself & appeals to me for help.
I have advised him to do as I did—make the best of a bad bargain & be wiser next time.
Webb’s dispute with Elisha Bliss was over the publication and reported sales of John Paul’s Book, Moral and Instructive: Consisting of Travels, Tales, Poetry, and Like Fabrications (1874). No sales records of the Columbian Book Company, a subsidiary of the American Publishing Company, have been found. For details of Clemens’s settlement of his “bad bargain” on The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, which Webb had published in 1867, see L4 , 247–48, 249 n. 2, 274, 281, 282 n. 4. Clemens’s quotation (“The whirligig . . . revenges.”) was from Twelfth Night, act 5, scene 1.
Clemens wrote these words at the top of a blank page, apparently as a title. He then crossed them out, turned the sheet upside down, and used it for manuscript pages 3 and 4 of this letter. The words now appear upside down near the bottom of page 4. Their significance has not been determined.
Clemens had agreed to a royalty of 7.5 percent on Roughing It in the belief that this figure represented half the profit. In March 1872, shortly after the book’s publication, he began to suspect that Bliss had overstated his manufacturing costs. He threatened to sue, but Bliss satisfied him and his attorney, Charles Perkins, that 7.5 percent “did represent half profits up to a sale of 50,000” (24 Oct 80 to OC, CU-MARK, in MTLP , 125; for details see L5 , 65–69, and RI 1993 , 877–81). If the cost of manufacturing a $3.50 book was $1.20, as Clemens had recently told Wright (29 Mar and 4 Apr 75 to Wrightclick to open letter), and Bliss sold books to his agents for one-half their cover price, then the profit on a $3.50 book was $.55, and a “half profit” was $.275, or 7.86 percent of the cover price. According to this calculation, Clemens’s royalty was only $.0125 per book less than Bliss claimed.
Webb had been married to the former Elizabeth W. Shipman, of Brooklyn, since October 1870.
Elisha Bliss had no known management role with the Columbian Book Company. Richard Woolworth Bliss, his younger brother, had been its secretary, treasurer, and manager since its founding in 1870 ( L4 , 217 n. 2; Geer: 1871, 283; 1872, 289; 1873, 292; 1874, 293).
American Publishing Company bindery records indicate that between 1 April 1874 and 30 March 1875, 4,016 copies of The Innocents Abroad and 3,337 copies of Roughing It were bound. At an average cover price of about $3.60, Clemens would have earned $723 from Innocents (5 percent royalty) and $901 from Roughing It (7.5 percent royalty). That the “business prostration,” which had begun with the panic of September 1873, continued to prevail is confirmed by the fact that “the number of failures in the United States for the nine months ending September 30, 1875, was 5,334, and the aggregate liabilities were $131,172,503. This is greater in number than has ever been recorded before during the same period” ( Annual Cyclopaedia 1875, 292). This may help explain why between 1 April and 30 June 1875 (“the next 3 months”) only 619 copies of Innocents and 504 copies of Roughing It were bound, a significant falling off from the demand during the previous twelve months (APC 1866–79, 101–15, 195, 203; 28 Feb 74 to Brown, n. 3click to open letter).
Sketches, New and Old, issued in September 1875.
Olivia had been ill for about a week.
MS, Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo (NBuU-PO).
L6 , 441–44; MTLP , 86–87.