February 25 Friday – In Hartford Sam wrote a short note to Charles Webster, asking him to come to Hartford and join Pamela Moffett (visiting) and his wife Annie Moffett Webster for “rest & recreation” from his neuralgia [MTP].

Charles Webster wrote to Sam: “Mr. Stedman has been to me and explained the character and scope of the work.” This was the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. Stedman was a poet and essayist of some note; Hutchinson the literary journalist for the New York Tribune. Sam did not exercise editorial control over this work. W.E. Dibble of Cincinnati had made plates for five of the volumes at this time. Webster would later become instrumental in hiring Dibble, Webster’s last major act with the firm [MTLTP 214n1].

Oggel writes of the nature, depth and importance of the LAL:

The resulting eleven-volume work was monumental: over 6,150 pages, almost 2,700 selections by more than 1,200 authors. Clemens (not yet [called] Mark Twain) was represented by three selections — the “Jumping Frog” story, and excerpts from The Prince and the Pauper and Huckleberry Finn — extending to seventeen pages in the ninth volume, covering 1881-1888…. The encyclopedic comprehensiveness of these volumes was stunning: ballads, folklore, oratory (Frederick Douglass and John C. Calhoun), Noted Sayings, platform lectures (Anna Dickinson), Civil War songs, Negro hymns and songs, personal narratives (Andrew Carnegie). Though it was enormously expensive to produce, draining the resources of Clemens’s publishing company, it sold well and was well reviewed. Its importance for writers of school texts and literary histories, including the landmark Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21), lasted more than half a century [50-1].