June 16 Sunday – Isabel Lyon’s journal: It’s a hot Sunday night and I’m sitting in Santa’s music room. The sounds from the streets would make one think of a terrible carnival; for the automobiles whirl along with toots and siren calls and trumpettings and now there is a motorcycle zipping down toward Washington Square and small boys are making whistles of grass blades and as I glance out of the window couples—and couples—forever saunter past. It is I alone who sit companionless [MTP TS 70].

Peter Richards, the German cartoonist who later claimed to have shared a cabin with Twain during the voyage to England on the S.S. Minneapolis, and to be his “personal caricaturist,” did several sketches of Twain, including a card with two sketches; Six postcards by Richards, whom Sam called a “jack-legged draughtsman” and signed by Clemens, were auctioned off on the last night of voyage. Paine notes one card brought $25, “perhaps a record price for a single Mark Twain signature” at that time [MTB 1381]. See insert [Zeichner und Gezeichnete 17].

Note: In a 1933 article, “Reminiscences of Mark Twain” in Library Review, p. 19-22, P. Richards claims his first meeting with Twain was in 1903, when Sam sat for Richards to do his pen-portrait for an unnamed “leading New York Weekly.” He further claims to have done “hundreds of caricatures of the great humorist.” He also forged an inscription and Mark Twain’s signature on the cover of his 1912 book, Zeichner and Geseichnete. Also, the Southeast Missourian (Cape Girardeau) for Sept. 22, 1927 printed this squib, though Sam was headed to Oxford, not a tour of Europe, and Richards shared a cabin with Ashcroft, not Clemens.

Mark Twain’s Hair Highly Cherished

——

Berlin, Sept. 22.—(AP)—A story about Mark Twain not widely known is told by Peter Richards, the newspaper artist now living in Berlin, who traveled with the American humorist as his personal caricaturist from New York to Liverpool on the former’s tour of Europe.

      Both men shared a cabin into which Mark Twain was wont to rush at all hours of the day to vent his wrath against the many gushing young women, and others not quite so young, among the passengers who insisted upon having “just a lock of dear Mr. Clemens’ hair as a souvenir.” 

Several photographs were taken of Mark Twain with various people during the voyage. One, dated June 16, 1907 by the MTP shows Sam in his white suit sitting with a dozen or so others in front of a deck shuffleboard (“horse billiards”) with one capped unidentified man holding a shuffleboard stick.

J.W. Sloper wrote from Leadville, Colo. asking to be informed when Mark Twain’s biography was expected to be completed, anxious to read it as he was working his way around the world [MTP]. Note: Lyon wrote on the letter: “Answd. July 30, 07”