February 28 Saturday – In Hartford Sam wrote to William Dean Howells asking a favor. Sam was interested in using a phonograph to dictate his new book, The American Claimant.

Won’t you drop in at the Boylston Building (New England Phonograph Co) & talk into the phonograph in an ordinary conversation-voice & see if another person (who didn’t hear you do it) can take the words from the thing without difficulty & repeat them to you…. My right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (& sell 100,000 copies of it — no, I mean a million — next fall.) I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don’t have to yell. I write 2,000 words a day; I think I can dictate twice as many.

But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you, — go ahead & do it, all the same. Ys ever [MTHL 2: 637-8]. Livy added a PS “protest” to say “it is a shameful to use a friend so.” Note: Howells answer came Mar. 3.

Frederick J. Hall wrote about getting out the Sherman book. Hall was glad Sam was writing a new book and had a plan he wanted to discuss for its sale that “we think will have the seventy-five thousand orders by the time we issue it….” [MTP].

Dunham Wheeler for Players Club (Dora Wheeler’s son) sent a handwritten note inviting Sam to lunch on Mar. 7. Sam wrote on the envelope, “Brer, ask him to give my love to the boys — am not able to be there” [MTP].

Morris White, a student at the Lexington, Miss. Normal School wrote to Sam asking for help with a speech he had to make on the life of Mark Twain [MTP].

The Hartford Courant ran a short humorous squib about Mark Twain on p.2 under “Bric-A-Brac”:

We read that at the Murray Hill Hotel the other day a porter vented his opinion in this wise concerning a gentleman not unknown in Hartford: “There goes the solemnest and dismalist gent as ever stopped at this ‘ouse. I don’t b’lieve he ever knowed what it was to larf.” The reference was to Samuel L. Clemens.