September 16 Thursday — In Redding, Conn, Sam replied to the Sept. 13 from James Beauchamp (“Champ”) Clark in Bowling Green, Mo.
Dear Champ Clark:
I am glad I have made another convert. This makes two, for sure, for while I was at it I converted myself. Well, no—that happened earlier.
I think we’ve got a mighty good (& lucid) copyright law at last. Hereafter there’ll be no complexities to fuss over. Effort can be restricted to a single & simple detail—extension of the term. Ten or fifteen years at a time. In the end, the author will be lifted to the rank of the publisher & the shoemaker: he will be the actual owner of his property, & it can’t be taken from him at the end of a specified term & given to his partner. All copyright laws give the author’s property to his own publisher (partner) at the end of the term, & he takes the entire swag after that.
This is accomplished by what he is called “publisher’s courtesy.” If I & my copyrights die tomorrow it would add $50,000 a year to my own publisher's profits & give not a penny to anybody else, for no reputable Pane would reprint my books & enter the field against my publisher. And my children? They would go hungry.
Is it possible that parliaments & Congresses do not know about this trick? For just 200 years they have strenuously legalized robbery & protected the thief without apparently being aware of what they were doing.
Last week the cablegrams said a public subscription was being taken up to save a grand-niece of Dickens’s from Starving. She would be sharing a vast income with Dickens’s publisher if Parliament had not robbed one citizen to fatten another one. Dickens’s publishers & grand-nieces (by grace of “publisher’s courtesy’ ’—otherwise “honor among thieves”) do not need any passing of the mendicant’s hat to save them from starving,
I was aiming to go to Washington next winter to conspire with you, but the doctors don’t allow me to travel, so I have to give that idea up. But you must come here—it’s only an hour & a half from New York; if you will, I promise to do my level best to make you good & happy. / Your friend /... [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Abbott Handerson Thayer, in Monadnock, N.H.
My Dear friend Thayer: / Jean tells me you wrote me. I have no recollection of it. It is most likely that Miss Lyon answered the letter on her own account & in her own way, written without consulting me, if she answered it at all. I was glad enough to have her answer silly & undesirable strangers without consulting me, but not friends. In those days I answered friends myself, tho’ not in these. I have a pain in my breast, now, that unfits me for talking & writing, so I have ceased from dictating & from using the pen, & all my letters are written now by Jean or by Mr. Paine—letters to friends, I mean; the stenographer manages the others.
I am sorry, very very sorry, if I have hurt you for I would not do that for anything, I hope you will forgive me. I have too strong a regard, too old a warm an affection, for all of you of the family, to purposely wound you.
Jean had a lovely time with the friends in Dublin & is full of it yet. My journeying days are over, or I should have been there myself. / Sincerely Yours / SL. Clemens [Archives of American Art, Thayer Papers online].