December 10 Saturday – At 21 Fifth Ave. in N.Y.C. Sam wrote to Robert Underwood Johnson, thanking him for being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters on Dec. 2. Johnson was the Secretary of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which founded the Academy in emulation of the French Academy, and formed to “foster, assist, and sustain excellence” in American literature, music, and art [MTP].

Sam’s sketch, “The $30,000 Bequest” first ran in Harper’s Weekly, and was collected in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906) [Budd, Collected 2: 1009].

The New York Times announced on p. BR867 “A new complete edition of Mark Twain …in twenty -three volumes by the Harpers,” the Hillcrest Edition, listing the illustrators: J.G. Brown, A.B. Frost, W.T. Smedley, Peter Newell, Dan Beard, F.B. Opper, Frank T. Merrill, Edward W. Kemble, T. de Thulstrup, F.V. Du Mond, C. Allan Gilbert, J.A. St. John, F.M. Senior, and Ignace Spiridon, “whose painting of Mark Twain is pronounced by Mr. Clemens himself his best portrait.” Sam had inscribed sets on Oct. 29 and Nov. 27.