11 June 1880 • Hartford, Conn. (MS facsimile: Skinner 1929, pp. 40–41, UCCL 01811)
I think yours is likely to be a unique autograph book, my dear Mrs. Booth, because it will mainly contain people’s very best Sunday-go-to-meeting hands. I imagine so, for this reason: Without previous thought, & making up one’s mind to it, one can’t snatch up a pen & slash away at such a snowy, vast & sumptuous sheet as this, with his unthinking every-day dash & freedom. No, he will be under a kind of drawing-room constraint which will make him anxious to write nicely, & will also make him leave out his customary blots, erasures, interlineations, & such other things as go to make up his ordinary autograph—his work-day autograph, his Tom-Dick-&-Harry autograph, so to speak.
But I am taking “previous thought;” I have consequently got my powers under control; consequently, also, I am writing in my work-a-day hand, with my every-day pen. OtherwiseⒶemendation this handsome page would have tricked me into doing my very carefulest & nicest—with a brand-new pen—thus:
five lines in copperplate hand with loops and flourishes:With great Respect, I remain
Yours, Very Truly,
Samuel L. Clemens,
Mark Twain.
—instead of dashing the thing off in my loose & reckless every-day style—thus:
Mark Twain.
MS facsimile, Skinner 1929, 40–41.
Parke-Bernet catalog, 12 May 1947, no. 871, lot 133, partial publication and partial facsimile.
The autograph book leaves, according to Otis Skinner in 1929, were “hidden away in a safe deposit vault for forty-seven years, since the death of Mrs. Booth, who was collecting them up to the time of her last illness.” They “are to be willed ultimately to the Players’ Club, founded by Edwin Booth” (Skinner 1929, 39). In 1947, they were instead offered for sale by Parke-Bernet as part of the collection of Paul Zuckerman.