June 17 Thursday – The Clemens family left New York and took the ten-hour train ride to Elmira, where Sam wrote a letter to Charles Webster about the Pope’s biography. Sam detailed what he felt a presentation copy of Leo XIII’s book should look like, feel like, and cost — a book bound in:

…pure solid gold lids…as thick as a tree-calf cover; have Tiffany design it, make it & chase & engrave it. The gold in it would weigh a couple of pounds, perhaps, & cost $500. Altogether the volume would cost ten or twelve hundred dollars; & when placed on exhibition in Tiffany’s window, all New York & all strangers visiting New York would flock to see it; the illustrated papers would make pictures of it & descriptions of it would appear in all languages…

Sam added that no, the gold would cost closer to $3,000 which was “all the better…Can’t get so much advertising so cheaply in any other way” [MTP].