July 8 Saturday – In Munich, Germany Sam wrote to Frederick J. Hall.

Dear Mr. Hall:

I am sincerely glad you are going to sell L.A.L. I am glad you are shutting off the agents, and I hope the fatal book will be out of our hands before it will be time to put them on again. With nothing but our non-existent capital to work with the book has no value for us, rich a prize as it will be to any competent house that gets it.

I hope you are making an effort to sell before you discharge too many agents, for I suppose the agents are a valuable part of the property.

We have been stopping in Munich for awhile, but we shall make a break for some country resort in a few days now. / Sincerely Yours / SLC [www.liveauctioneers.com/item/573209 for original].

Sam then added another equal section with the same date:

I judge your only hope of salvation is in discharging them [sales agents] all at once, since it is their commissions that threaten to swamp us. It is they who have eaten up the $14,000 I left with you in such a brief time, no doubt.

I feel panicky.

He added a PS that he’d not received a monthly report for “many months” [MTLTP 349-50]. Note: LAL was still being sold on subscription, with sales agents paid usually before monies came into Webster & Co., which created a cash-flow problem. When in New York, Sam withdrew the $14,000 from his Wall Street account with Mr. Halsey and left it with Hall. This was to serve as their “emergency fund,” but was needed in the business right away, mostly to pay these agents [350n2].

George Saintsbury of Academy magazine (London) XLIV p.28 briefly reviewed The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other Stories, concluding it was a dull book. “If there is fun in this volume of Mark Twain’s (except a certain faint and overwrought strain of it in the mock romance of ‘The Enemy Conquered’) this reviewer avows himself a conquered enemy” [Tenney 21].