June 11 Friday – Sam wrote two pages from Hartford to Mary M. Booth (Mrs. Edwin Booth) in response to her request for his autograph:

I think yours is likely to be a unique autograph book, my dear Mrs. Booth, because it will mainly contain people’s very best Sunday-go-to-meeting hands. I imagine so, for this reason: Without previous thought, & making up one’s mind to it, one can’t snatch up a pen & slash away at such a snowy, vast & sumptuous sheet as this, with his unthinking every-day dash & freedom. No, he will be under a kind of drawing-room constraint which will make him anxious to write nicely, & will also make him leave out his customary blots, erasures, interlineations, & such other things as go to make up his ordinary autograph—his work-day autograph, his Tom-Dick-&-Harry autograph, so to speak.

But I am taking “previous thought;” I have consequently got my powers under control; consequently, also, I am writing in my work-a-day hand, with my every-day pen.—Otherwise this handsome page would have tricked me into doing my very carefulest & nicest—with a brand-new pen—thus:

With great Respect I remain

Yours Very Truly

Samuel L. Clemens,

Mark Twain

—instead of dashing the thing off in my loose & reckless every-day style —thus:

Truly Yours

S.L. Clemens

Mark Twain.

Hartford, June 11, 1880.                                                                                                                  

[MTLE 5: 125; “Leaves from the Autograph Album of Mrs. Edwin Booth,” The Golden Magazine 10.57 (September 1929): 39-42]. Note: Sam gave a thinner and careful autograph in the first instance.