Beschreibung:

CLEMENS, S. L. The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain. Revised and Corrected by the Author . London: Chatto & Windus 1874, 8vo. Original maroon decorated cloth (binding broken with a number of leaves loose in binding [but all present], some frayed or soiled at margins.) SIGNED "MARK TWAIN" ON FRONT PASTEDOWN., a pencil rendering of Twain's Hartford home on the recto of frontispiece, TABLE OF CONTENTS AND EXTENSIVE SECTIONS OF THE BOOK HEAVILY REVISED AND CORRECTED BY TWAIN, apparently for a new edition: in all Clemens has lined through, revised or annotated the text on approximately 143 of the book's 563 pages. See BAL 3605. CLEMENS EDITS CLEMENS The volume is a collected edition containing many of Clemens' most popular works, Parts I and II consist of The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's Progress . Part III constitutes an extensive selection of Twain's "Humorous Stories and Sketches," and here, Clemens' deletions and annotations are quite numerous. He has entirely lined through many stories, including "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The Table of Contents is heavily annotated to rearrange the order of the sketches and stories. Many of the textual revisions consist of a single word change or the insertion of a short phrase, but in some cases, such as pp. 421-423, in the story "The Case of George Fisher " are more extensive. In the bottom margins of that story Twain notes: "Some years ago, when this was first published, few people believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza. In these latter days it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of our government was a novelty. The very man who showed me where to find the documents for this case was at the very time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern in the effort to procure a subsidy for the company-a fact which was a long time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last & underwent Congressional investigation." In his sketch, "An Item Which the Editor Himself Could Not Understand," on pp. 469-471, Twain has altered the name of one character, printed as "Skac" to "Bloke," and has made other word substitutions. At the end of "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper," at pp. 514-517, Twain adds an exemplary note: "This glycerine [i.e. nitro glycerin ] catastrophe is borrowed from a floating newspaper item, whose author's name I would give if I knew it.-M.T." Beneath a critical excerpt from the Boston Advertiser , referring to a column entitled "Memoranda," Twain comments: "The editor of this volume was at that time editing a department entitled 'Memoranda' in a popular magazine." On p. 537 Twain instructs the printer, "Put all extracts in small type S.L.C." and in the lower margins of p. 538, where the story "History Repeats Itself" begins, he remarks: "I had not seen the Review's article when I wrote this; but curiously enough, the travesty [parody] turned out to be a tolerably close one, nevertheless. M.T." In a list of great Indian leaders, in the sketch "A Visit to Niagara," on p. 395, one is deleted and Twain has scribbled in another fictitious chief: "Whoopdedoodledo!" Provenance : Estelle Doheny, bookplate (sale, Christie's, 21 Feb 1989, lot 1742).