December 2 Friday – In Florence Sam wrote to Frederick J. Hall, giving his “cable address” and addressing a list of items.
Your statement does indeed show up handsomely. It looks as if we’re about out of the woods at last. So mote it be!
Sam also liked a catalogue sent and noted receiving a “very pleasant letter” from Mary Mapes Dodge. He felt $4,000 was enough, he guessed, for Part I of Tom Sawyer Abroad, giving that it only took him “3 weeks to write it.” He also asked about an old article:
Won’t you get for me an article which I published in Harper’s Monthly several years ago about a Curious Old Book? & tear it out & send it to me. Don’t remember the title, but Poole’s Index will furnish it. It was about an ancient Medical Dictionary. I want the paragraph from it for the extravagant novel I am writing — the one about the Extraordinary Twins which I began in Nauheim last August. I’ve written about 60,000 words on it, I guess & 20 or 30,000 more will finish it. I shall soon be done [MTP]
Note: The article was “A Majestic Literary Fossil” (1890); the ancient Medical Dictionary was Robert James’ A Medical Dictionary (1743). On Nov. 24 Sam claimed 43,000 words for PW, so he’d been clipping right along on it. See Dec. 12 for rewrite of “Twins” story into PW.
Sam also agreed with taking $2,000 from Mr. Scott now and another $2,000 in a year. This may have been the embezzler, Frank M. Scott.
Sam also wrote to Franklin G. Whitmore, another list of items, including the progress on his scalp:
My hair is showing up again. It is about as long as a door-mat’s, now, & just booming — very thick & tough, & never a hair comes out. But last summer it used to come out by the hatful.
He was making great progress on PW, the family saying yesterday’s chapters were the best he’d done. He thought Frederick Hall was doing “pretty well” with his books, and noted his royalties there for the old books were $4,000 for the last six months, and that he was being paid $500 a month from that.
He was satisfied with Frank Bliss telling Whitmore that he wasn’t going to issue cheap editions of his books, because Sam didn’t think he’d ever told him a lie. He’d received Whitmore’s statement for the year and commented that John O’Neil, his Hartford gardener and caretaker, was making out “handsomely with his flowers,” raised for sale in the greenhouse. He also noted a receipt of a letter from “Brer Robinson” and would write him “before long” [MTP].
Mrs. William S. Karr wrote to Sam and Livy [MTP]. Note: this letter confirmed as missing from the MTP files by Robert Hirst on my last trip there in Feb. 2009. Missing but perhaps not lost, as letters are sometimes misfiled. I found one misfiled from Joe Goodman to SLC which had been “lost” since 1995.