May 6 Friday – Sam had initially hired Charles Webster to take charge of the Kaolatype investment, but he soon became a general business manager. Samuel Webster writes: “Mark Twain started at once to unload instructions, plans, and bright ideas onto his new helper. After several letters dealing with the reorganization of Kaolatype and schemes for getting back some of the money loaned to Slote we find Uncle Sam busy with plans for sending that young genius Sneider to jail” [MTBus 153].

In Hartford Sam replied to the May 5 from Webster:

All right—am mailing that letter to Slote. For our lawyer’s information, I will state that in it I propose to “arrest Sneider on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses,” & ask Slote if he is willing to bear one half the expenses of the suit. —adding, that he ought really to bear a larger proportion than that, because if he had stood to his part of the agreement & run the business himself, instead of taking Sneider’s word for everything, the transparent swindle would have been detected long ago & the outlay stopped.

Sam claimed that Sneider took the $5,000 and $150 a month with a lie that he’d invented a new process, when in actuality he’d only worked by “old methods—& at the same time not succeeding with them” [MTBus 153-4]. Samuel Charles Webster, Charles Webster’s son, makes the point in Mark Twain Businessman that his father had been in charge but one week and already Sam was starting a lawsuit [154].

Sam also wrote again to Laura C. Redden Searing, who’d followed up her first note with a host of questions about working with a publisher, on a similar book to Sam’s Cyclopedia of Humor. Sam advised her to begin at ten per cent royalty (on the retail price), and then see if the publisher counter-offers.

“One more item for your private information: If your publisher pays you 10 per cent—say 35 cents per copy—he will still clear about 75 cents a copy himself. Ask me further, if you wish to—I will tell you whatever I can” [MTP]. See Apr. 16 entry.

Charles Webster wrote to Sam: “I have found as I expected that Raub’s accounts are short” involving bills strung out to the Kaolatype effort. “I have no confidence in Raub’s honesty but we had better keep him until we can fill his place” [MTP].