May 28 Thursday – Sam’s notebook: “Dr. Ferrar [sic Farrar] / 1271 Bway / 11 am. / [Horiz. Line separator] / Plasmon meeting 1.30 / [Horiz. Line separator] / 142 E 33d. Robt. Reed. 5. ” [NB 46 TS 17]. Note: Dr. John Nutting Farrar (1839-1913), dentist, “Father of American Orthodontics.”
Robert J. Collier wrote to Sam.
(This is rough & tentative, but will furnish a working basis for negotiation.) Our proposition would shape itself somewhat like this: We would make entirely new plates of all your books and print in editions of five or ten thousand, with twenty or twenty-two volumes to the set, selling by subscription only for a dollar a volume.
We would pay you a royalty of two dollars a set and guarantee you on that basis eighty thousand dollars during the two years from Oct. 1st, 1903, to Oct. 1st, 1905, payable quarterly. At the end of two years if the arrangement prove mutually satisfactory we shall continue on the same terms without further guarantee, otherwise you retain the privilege to buy back the plates from us at cost price. We have no objections to your selling other editions by subscription or otherwise providing the price be not less than $1.50 a volume [MTP]. Note: Sam added along the right edge: “P.S. by me. Later we made it 10% per vol., but leaving the $80,000 guarantee as it is. S.L. Clemens.”
Thomas F. Gatts (1863-1915), attorney for the 1904 St. Louis Fair, sent Sam a special delivery letter from Hannibal, Mo. The statement declared, “The National Mark Twain Association,” home in Hannibal, Mo.:
“Our object shall be in some befitting way and manner during the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, to commemorate and celebrate the name and fame of Mark Twain as one of the greatest writers, and the product of the Louisiana Purchase” [MTP].