June 26 Sunday – In Kaltenleutgeben near Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Samuel S. McClure.

I’m finishing an article, “The Great Republic’s Peanut Stand,” & you can bid on that if you want to pay a super-scandalously high price for it. The subject is copyright (which is up again in the English parliament.) In all seriousness I regard this as the only intelligent article which has ever been written upon the subject on either side of the water; as indeed the only article upon the subject which has not been chiefly characterized by ignorance & stupidity; & finally, as the only one which has pointed the way to a just & rational copyright law. It has cost me a lot of thinking & planning, & I must charge for that. It is illustrated by two (very rude) drawings from my own pencil. Rude but to the point….I (after Socrates) have re-instituted the plan of insuring interest in a grave subject by discussing it in the form of dialogue—brief questions, brief answers; a form which livens up the look of the page & also keeps the topic afire. I shall patent it, & kill imitators. Not many people can write effective dialogue; & when they can, they must charge [MTP: David J. Holmes Autographs catalogs, Item 56a].

Note: Sam’s notebook: “June 26. Wrote McClure about G. Rep’s Peanut Stand” [NB 42 TS 56]. “The Great Republic’s Peanut Stand”: this article advocated copyright protection in perpetuity, prefiguring Sam’s Jan. 1905 article in the North American Review: “Concerning Copyright.” “Peanut Stand” was never published, and was another of those “infamous discoveries” at the MTP the press likes to trumpet. This time it wasn’t Fishkin who “discovered” a “lost” piece by Twain—a Feb. 16, 1998 NY Times article claimed it was “unearthed” by graduate student Mr. Siva Vaidhyanathan. To the MTP’s credit, I have made several trips to Berkeley and can attest to the fact that none of their assets are buried in earth, nor are they “lost”, though may sometimes be mis-filed. Further, if the Times had looked at MTHHR 354n1, published in 1969, they would have discovered “Peanut Stand” was not “lost” at all.

Sam also put this date on an essay which Paine later titled, “A Viennese Procession.” AMT 1: 118 gives this description: “…highlights Clemens’s genuine delight in public ceremony and showy costume, describes a parade in honor of the fiftieth year of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria (1830-1916), which was also celebrated with an extensive exhibition of” commerce and agriculture and science. The essay gives Sam’s movements and travel into Vienna on this Sunday morning. In part:

I went in the eight o’clock train to Vienna, to see the procession. It was a stroke of luck, for at the last moment I was feeling lazy and was minded not to go. But when I reached the station, five minutes late, the train was still there, a couple of friends were there also, and so I went. At Leising, half an hour out, we changed to a very long train, and left for Vienna with every seat occupied. …

I have seen no procession which evoked more enthusiasm than this one brought out. It would have made any country deliver its emotions, for it was a most stirring sight to see. At the end of the year I shall be sixty-three—if alive—and about the same if dead. I have been looking at processions for sixty years; and curiously enough, all my really wonderful ones have come in the last three years: one in India in ’96, the Queen’s Record procession in London last year, and now this one. As an appeal to the imagination—an object-lesson synopsizing the might and majesty and spread of the greatest empire the world has seen—the Queen’s procession stands first; as a picture for the eye, this one beats it; and in this regard it even falls no very great way short, perhaps, of that Jeypore pageant—and that was a dream of enchantment [AMT 1: 124-6]. Note: the religious procession in Jaipur, India in Mar. 1896 is described in FE, ch. 60. See source for full text.

Sam also wrote to an unidentified local woman:

“I thank you very much for the pleasant words you say in your note [not extant], & also for the copies of your books. I am almost always unoccupied at 11, mornings, & shall hope to see you next time. The afternoon is my working time—I was sorry, yesterday, that that was the case” [MTP].