27 August 1875 • Newport, R.I. (MS: OClRC, UCCL 11313)
The enclosed ought to have been answered long ago, but it got mislaid & I forgot all about it. Please answer these gentlemen yourself—say what seems best & right—& send me a copy of your letter. It seems to me that to issue in Canada a cheap edition on the same day with a costly one, would simply kill the latter.1explanatory note
Please turn to your books & give me an official statement of the royalties you have paid me upon Canadian sales of my 3 books.2explanatory note
letter docketed: ✓
Neither the enclosed letter, nor Bliss’s reply to it, has been found. The book the unidentified Canadian firm wished to issue doubtless was Sketches, New and Old. Bliss presumably declined permission for the proposed edition, which inevitably would have found its way into the United States and taken sales away from the American Publishing Company volume. The first Canadian edition of the sketchbook, entitled Sketches by Mark Twain, was an 1879 piracy issued by Belfords, Clarke and Company of Chicago and Toronto, and by its affiliate, Belford and Company of Toronto. It sold for $.30 in paperback and $1.00 in cloth (Roper, 57).
Bliss could not provide such a statement because, as Clemens should have known, the American Publishing Company did not own the Canadian distribution rights to all three of his books it had published to date. George Routledge and Sons, publishers of the authorized English editions of Roughing It and The Gilded Age, held Imperial copyright on those books, entitling them to exclusive distribution rights in Canada. The surviving bindery records for The Innocents Abroad, the only book that Bliss could legally sell in Canada, do not distinguish between sales there and in the United States (SLC 1869, 1872, 1874; L5 , 638; Roper, 38–41).
MS, Rowfant Club, Cleveland (OClRC).
L6 , 529–530.
The MS, presumably kept in the American Publishing files after receipt, was tipped into a copy of My Début as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories, volume 23 of set 272 of the Autograph Edition of the Writings of Mark Twain (American Publishing Company, 1899–1907). The book and MS were owned by Adrian G. Newcomb, later by Dr. and Mrs. Charles Herndon, and finally by the Rowfant Club.