Details
CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE ("Mark Twain"). Autograph letter signed ("Saml. L. Clemens") TO THE ARTIST, THOMAS NAST, Hartford, Connecticut, 17 December [1872?]. 2 pages, 8vo, written on pages 1 and 3 of a four-page sheet of Twain's personal monogrammed stationery, evidence of old mount and a small loss in blank margin of page 3.
TWAIN TO NAST
"My Dear Nast, I thank you heartily for your kindness to me & to my friend Charley [Charles M. Fairbanks]. The Almanac [Nast's Illustrated Almanac for 1873] has come, & I have enjoyed those pictures with all my soul & body. Perkins's plagiarism of Doestick's celebrated Niagara drunk is tolerable -- that is, for a man to write whose proper place is in an asylum for idiots. Pity that I should say it who am his personal acquaintance.
"Your 'Mexico' is a fifty-years history of that retrograding chaos of a country protrayed upon the space of one's thumb-nail, so to speak; & that Sphinx in 'Egypt' charms me -- I wish I could draw that old head in that way. I wish you could go to England with us in May. Surely you could never regret it. I do hope my publishers can make it pay you to illustrate my English book. Then I should have good pictures. They've got to improve on 'Roughing It.' Yrs. Ever...."
Nast's 1873 Almanac contained "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper," by Twain, and a story by Perkins of a man who visits 125 different New Years parties, indulging in one or two drinks at each, with predictable results. Twain considered it a plagiarism of a similar story by Q.K. Philander Doesticks (Mortimer N. Thomson). Twain's plan for "my English book," with Nast illustrations, was eventually abandoned. Partially published in Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904.
Provenance:
Thomas Nast (sale, Merwin Clayton Galleries, 2-3 April 1906), which auction included five Clemens letters. In Mark Twain: A Biography, Paine wrote that Clemens was gratified by the fact that his letters brought the highest prices in the sale, higher than letters of Roosevelt, Grant and Lincoln. A nine-page letter sold for $43., "said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man," according to Paine.
TWAIN TO NAST
"My Dear Nast, I thank you heartily for your kindness to me & to my friend Charley [Charles M. Fairbanks]. The Almanac [Nast's Illustrated Almanac for 1873] has come, & I have enjoyed those pictures with all my soul & body. Perkins's plagiarism of Doestick's celebrated Niagara drunk is tolerable -- that is, for a man to write whose proper place is in an asylum for idiots. Pity that I should say it who am his personal acquaintance.
"Your 'Mexico' is a fifty-years history of that retrograding chaos of a country protrayed upon the space of one's thumb-nail, so to speak; & that Sphinx in 'Egypt' charms me -- I wish I could draw that old head in that way. I wish you could go to England with us in May. Surely you could never regret it. I do hope my publishers can make it pay you to illustrate my English book. Then I should have good pictures. They've got to improve on 'Roughing It.' Yrs. Ever...."
Nast's 1873 Almanac contained "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper," by Twain, and a story by Perkins of a man who visits 125 different New Years parties, indulging in one or two drinks at each, with predictable results. Twain considered it a plagiarism of a similar story by Q.K. Philander Doesticks (Mortimer N. Thomson). Twain's plan for "my English book," with Nast illustrations, was eventually abandoned. Partially published in Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904.
Provenance:
Thomas Nast (sale, Merwin Clayton Galleries, 2-3 April 1906), which auction included five Clemens letters. In Mark Twain: A Biography, Paine wrote that Clemens was gratified by the fact that his letters brought the highest prices in the sale, higher than letters of Roosevelt, Grant and Lincoln. A nine-page letter sold for $43., "said to be the highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man," according to Paine.