February 6 Saturday – Sam signed a contract with James Paige, agreeing to pay him $7,000 annual salary, and undertake up to $30,000 in improvements to the typesetter, with no overall ceiling on his investment responsibilities. He was also obligated to raise capital for the machine and to promote it upon completion. In exchange, Sam would gain a larger share of the profits. Hamersley, for money already invested and for legal advice, was let in for ten per cent. Powers writes:

February 5 Friday – Orion Clemens wrote Sam, acknowledging receipt of $155 check, from which he gave $5 to “Puss” Quarles and deposited $50 into his mother’s account. He’d heard from Theodore W. Crane that the Clemens family was well and from Ed F. Brownell that the papers contained word of the quarter million given to Mrs.

February 3 Wednesday – In Hartford Sam received a visit by Professor Francis Wayland (1826-1904), dean of the law school at Yale. In a letter to Julia D. Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant) Sam quoted Wayland about the Grant Memoirs:

February 2 Tuesday – In Hartford Sam wrote to an unidentified man who evidently had asked him to write more opinion of copyright law:

I had very little to say, & I said it in the current Century & before the committee…And anyway, writing miscellaneous[s] articles is a thing which I disenjoy [MTP].

February 1 Monday – Back in Hartford Sam wrote to Charles Webster, advising him to try and put publishing General Grant’s letters to Mrs. Grant off for a year. He wrote that Livy suggested it and they’d talked it over. 

February – An agreement was reached with James W. Paige and William J. Hamersley stimulated by their Jan. 20 meeting with Sam in Elmira. Sam would undertake additional capitalization input in exchange for half ownership in the Paige typesetter. Kaplan writes:

January 31 Sunday – From the Hotel Normandie in New York City, Sam wrote a short letter to William C. Prime, who was representing General George B. McClellan’s widow for publishing the General’s memoirs. Charles L. Webster & Co. Published McClellan’s Own Story in 1887.

January 30 Saturday – Sam was at the Hotel Normandie in New York [Prime’s Jan. 29].

The copyright issue and bills in the U.S. Congress also resonated overseas. The London Pall Mall Gazette carried an article, “THE AMERICANS AND INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT” on p.7:

January 29 Friday – As Fatout points out, Sam was somewhat ambivalent about the Hawley Bill but when pressed on the matter before the Senate Committee on Patents on the second day of testimony, he said:

January 28 Thursday – In Washington, D.C., Sam spoke before the U.S. Senate Committee, His “Remarks on Copyright” can be found in Fatout’s Mark Twain Speaking, p.206-9. Fatout prefaces: