March 21 Monday – By his letter of Mar. 20 to Rogers, Sam seemed anxious to go to the reopening session of the Austrian Parliament this afternoon. In his Mar. 23 to Rogers he confirmed that he went:
“I was present at the opening of Parliament, but it was peaceable & dull; so I have not been there since.”
March 20 Sunday – In Vienna, Austria, Sam added a PS to his Mar. 17 letter to H.H. Rogers
P.S. But really you should come yourself—for some good sense and good diplomacy are necessary, on account of the promised auxiliary invention. You might find it worth while to wait to include it in the present Option, and you are the very man to know how to make them do it.
March 19 Saturday – Sam’s notebook: “Saturday, March 19. Susy’s birth-day. It was then that that dear life began which ended a year & seven months ago” [NB 40 TS 15].
The New York Times, p.BR185 reprinted an article from the London Academy.
Honor Be Unto Mark Twain.
From the London Academy.
March 18 Friday – Clemens inscribed a cabinet-size photo of himself: “To Sigmund Schlesinger with cordial greetings. Mark Twain, Mar 18” [Sotheby’s June 19, 2003 Lot 7].
At 4 p.m. Sam again met with Jan Szczepanik’s banker, Ludwig Kleinberg: “Friday I went with Mr. Kleinberg & Mr. Wood to see the ‘rasters.’” [NB 40 TS 15].
More from Sam’s notebook:
March 17 Thursday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam, instead of waiting to meet the banker Ludwig Kleinberg at 4 p.m., sent for him at breakfast. There he agreed to a two -month option at Kleinberg’s price of $1.5 million, payable in installments and extendable by request, for American rights to the Raster, invented by Jan Szczepanik (see Mar. 16 entry). Sam would receive a twelve percent commission if he sold the rights for that amount.
March 16 Wednesday – After writing Amelia S. Levetus, a meeting was arranged for this evening, and the young inventor, Jan Szczepanik, visited the Clemens’ suite at the Metropole. The invention Sam was most excited about was the Raster, a labor-saving machine for electrically copying graphic images directly into woven fabric. Sam was ever-enamored of labor-saving devices.
Sam’s notebook of Mar. 18 relates what he did prior to the evening meeting:
March 15 Tuesday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Livy had tea with Amelia S. Levetus, a British correspondent in Vienna.
Sam was not in at the time. His notebook tells what happened when he arrived and heard Livy tell of exciting new inventions by Jan Szczepanik (1872-1926), who had become well known as an inventor of the Fernseher, or “telectroscope,” a rudimentary television system: insert diagrams.
March 13 Sunday – The New York World ran a brief interview with Sam on p. 7, “Mark Twain Proud and Happy,” about his feelings of getting out of debt [MTCI 331-2].
March 12 Saturday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to John Y. MacAlister.
“The correspondent of the Times has handed me a copy of the paper, whereby I see that you took the trouble to bring to notice the fact that I have worked myself out of debt. You could not have done me a greater favor than that, & I sincerely thank you for it.”
March 8 Tuesday – Sam’s essay “Dueling,” written this day, was not published in his lifetime but collected in Europe and Elsewhere (1923) [AMT-1: 299-302, 707:1898a].
The ledger books of Chatto & Windus show that 5,000 additional copies of More Tramps Abroad, (FE) were printed (totaling 23,000 to date in London). The official English publication date was Nov. 25, 1897