per Fanny C. Hesse
10 December 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS, revised by SLC: CU-MARK, UCCL 01511)
Please ask your papers to give this item a start.1explanatory note Get some discreet friend—dont go yourself—to go to that canvasser & be ingenious enough to get out of him the address of theat “Franklin Publishing Company”—that is to say the name of the thief that calls himself the Franklin Pub. Co—& his private or official address. I mean findⒶemendation out where this man gets his books from. It is most likely that he gets them from a subordinate thief—but at the same time the head quatersⒶemendation are of course out west somewhere & not in New York. So it is not doubt possible to get the head quatersⒶemendation address which is what I want.2explanatory note
“The Post” does not make a living—has not paid expenses for two or three years.3explanatory note
Get your Editors to make editorial reference to the fact that that book is being canvassed for, in Keokuk & the contracts made with the canvasser are binding upon nobody.
Pr F C. H.
In a telegram that is now lost, Orion had notified Clemens that a book falsely attributed to Mark Twain was being sold in Keokuk, Iowa, by someone representing himself as an agent of the fictitious Franklin Publishing Company, of New York. He elaborated in the following letter (CU-MARK):
Keokuk, Dec. 9, 1877.
My Dear Brother:
A cousin of Secretary Mc Crary, and a law partner with him was the victim who first called my attention to the fraud. I immediately said to myself, “I see how this is. About three printers have spent all summer writing and setting up that trashy book. They must be printers. Nobody else would have named a publishing company after Franklin. They have established agencies all over the United States. Those books will be have been sent out secretly, put into the hands of agents. The mine will be sprung just before Christmas, and fifty thousand books will be sold before the fraud will be discovered. Then when the real agents come with Sam’s next book, people will say, ‘I got fooled once, I am afraid to buy.’ I will telegraph Sam so he can prosecute for using his trade-mark, and telegraph all over the United States to have the people put on their guard.[”]
After telegraphing to you I went back to McCrary’s office, and one of those present removed the paper cover on which was printed the legend, “Elbow Room, by Mark Twain,” and on the book itself was “Elbow Room, Max Adeler.” A closer examination of the title page revealed that Adeler’s title page had been cut away, and to its brief remains pasted the title page of “Elbow Room; or the Innocents at Home, by Mark Twain.” Then Alderman Charlie Higham, (brother of Dick), reached out his right hand to the sharp lawyer, and with loud lamentation a hearty laugh greeted him with a grasp of sympathetic hand-shaking as one of the “Innocents at Home.”
I then hunted for the sharper to arrest him for obtaining money under false pretenses, but he had shinned out, after spending but one night and a day here, and without offering to sell at the hotels or railroad offices. I gave an account of the matter to the Gate City, which produces it this mor[n]ing. I also gave an account of it to the eve[n]ing paper for to-morrow evening, and to the agent of the associated press, who wrote it out to send it away.
The man was said to have a rough, western aspect, and was supposed to have come from Burlington and proceeded to Quincy.
The doctored book, Elbow-Room: A Novel Without a Plot (Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart and Co., 1876), was by Max Adeler (one of the pseudonyms of Charles Heber Clark), an old antagonist of Clemens’s (26 Apr 1870 to Fuller, L4, 120, 121–22 n. 4). For Secretary of War George W. McCrary see 27 Feb 1877 to McCrary, n. 1. His cousin and law partner was Alvin J. McCrary (1844–1929). Charles Higham (1848–1920) was a Keokuk alderman from 1876 to 1879. His brother, Richard (1839–62), had been Clemens’s comrade in the mid-1850s when they worked together in Orion’s print shop in Keokuk (AutoMT1, 444, 460, 640; Roberts 1887, 9–10). Orion enclosed a clipping of the Keokuk Gate City item:
A Snide Book Agent.—During the past few days the city has been canvassed for a new work called “Elbow Room,” which the agent represented was by Mark Twain. On Friday morning Mr. A. J. McCrary subscribed for a copy of the work and in the afternoon it was delivered to him. In glancing over it he discovered that it didn’t sound much like Mark Twain, so he hunted up Mr. Orion Clemens, and on inquiry ascertained that the book was a fraud as his brother had written no work under that title. Upon examination it was found that the title page of the book had been torn out and another inserted, on which was printed “Elbow Room,” by Mark Twain. Removing a paper cover which had been placed there to assist in perpetrating the fraud, it was discovered that the work is by “Max Adeler.”
In a rambling letter of 3 December (CU-MARK), Orion had asked:
Sam, can’t I get Hall’s interest in the Post? If I could pay a thousand dollars down, and give a mortgage for ten thousand, with 7 per cent. interest, I could pay the interest out of my wages, if I could get $30 a week again. That would leave me $860 a year to live on, which is about $840 a year more than I am making now. I have busted in the printing business several times, but so did Wm Mc Kee, and made it win at last. Of course these busts impair confidence, but I would be more likely to succeed now with than without my experience. I think allowance should be made for romance dispelled. If I got into the printing business again I should subordinate my whims to my business
Clemens’s neighbor Ezra Hall, a Hartford lawyer and a proprietor of the Hartford Evening Post, had died after a brief illness on 3 November 1877 at the age of forty-two. The Hartford Courant reported that Clemens was one of the pallbearers at Hall’s funeral on 5 November (“Death of Ezra Hall,” 5 Nov 1877, 2). In a letter of 17 November, Orion told Clemens: “I thank Livy for sending me an account of Hall’s death. It was a shock. I liked him” (CU-MARK; the letter from Olivia is not known to survive). He had worked for Hall on the Evening Post from the fall of 1872 until the spring of 1873 (L5: 25 Sept 1872 to OLC, 182 n. 11; 5 Dec 1872 to the editor of the Hartford Evening Post, 245 n. 1; 5 May 73 to OC and MEC, 363 n. 1). William McKee, an old friend of Orion’s, was printing foreman of the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, and had given him temporary work in February 1868 (21 Feb 1868 to OC, L2, 198 n. 1).
MS, revised by SLC, CU-MARK.
MicroML, reel 4.
See Moffett Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open letter.