 camera is coming up. Hello and welcome to the Chamber Street Theatre. We're reading from a book today, the autobiography of Mark Twain. He wrote this late in his life when he was a reflective older person, quite aware of his shortcomings and sort of the loss of some of his skills, but still a marvelous storyteller, just a wonderful, wonderful book full of things that weren't included in his other books, and it's about time we learned some of the backgrounds of some of the stories, and it's fun to hear. He talks about a number of people who were his friends, who have passed on, and well, you'll hear. Today we're going to be reading about publishing, like what it was like to get something published in those days and the things that he had to go through to get things published, and some of the crooks of the publishing industry, who I'm pretty sure are still among us, maybe not the exact same people, but new crooks, because about the only one who can make money in publishing these days is publishers, not the writers. That's why it's wonderful that we now have Kindle and other things, electronic versions of books, so that the crooks of the publishing industry aren't making all the money. Well, we're going to start reading chapter 29, some of the crooks of his time. I lectured in all the principal California towns and in Nevada, then lectured once or twice more in San Francisco, then retired from the field rich, for me, and laid out a plan to sail westward from San Francisco and go around the world. The proprietors of the daily Alta Californian engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper. Fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about 2,000 words per letter, and paid to about $20 per letter. I went east to St. Louis to say goodbye to my mother, and then I was bitten by the prospectus of Captain Duncan of the Quaker City Excursion, and I ended up by joining it. During the trip, I wrote and sent the 50 letters, six of them miscarried, and I wrote six new ones to complete my contract. Then I put together a lecture on the trip and delivered it in San Francisco at great and satisfactory profit. Then I branched out into the country and was aghast at the result. I had been entirely forgotten. I had never had people enough in my houses to sit on a jury of an inquest on my lost reputation. I inquired into this curious condition of things, and found that the thrifty owners of that prodigiously rich Alta newspaper had copyrighted all those poor little $20 letters, and had threatened with persecution or prosecution any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them. And there I was. I had contracted to furnish a large book concerning the excursion to the American publishing company of Hartford. And I supposed I should need all those letters to fill it out with. I was in an uncomfortable situation. That is, if the proprietors of this stealthily acquired copyright should refuse to let me use the letters, that is just what they did. Mr. Max Something, and here I'm turning a page, that I'd forgotten the rest of his name, Max Something, said his firm was going to have a book out of the letters in order to get back the $1,000 which they had paid for them. I said that if they had acted fairly and honorably and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture skirmish on the coast would have paid me $10,000 whereas the Alta had lost me that amount. Then he offered a compromise. He would publish the book and allow me 10% royalty on it. The compromise did not appeal to me and I said so. The book sale would be confined to San Francisco and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months whereas my eastern contract if carried out could be profitable to me for I had a sort of reputation on the Atlantic Seaboard acquired through the publication of six excursion letters in the New York Tribune and one or two in the Herald. In the end Mr. Max, whatever, agreed to suppress his book on certain conditions. In my preface I must thank the Alta for waiving its rights and granting me permission. I objected to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity thank the Alta for bankrupting my lecture raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out. I wrote the rest of Innocence Abroad in 60 days and I could have added a fortnight's labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again by hundreds of years. I worked every night from 11 or 12 until broad day in the morning and as I did 200,000 words in the 60 days the average was more than 3,000 words a day. Nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people but quite handsome for me. In 1897 when we were living in Tedworth Square London and I was writing the book called Following the Equator my average was 1,800 words a day. Here in Florence 1904 my average seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours. I was deducing from the above that I have been slowing down steadily in these 36 years. I wrote The Innocence Abroad in the months of March and April in 1868 in San Francisco. It was published in August of 1869. Three years afterwards Mr. Goodman of Virginia City on whose newspaper I had served 10 years before and of whom I have much to say in the book roughen it, I seem to be overloading this sentence and I apologize. Well he came east and we were walking down Broadway one day when he said, how did you come to see a steel Oliver Wendell Holmes dedication and put it in your book? I made a careless and inconsequential answer for I supposed he was joking but he assured me that he was in earnest. He said, I'm not discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn't for that question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to. I am only asking you how you come to steal it and that's where my curiosity is focused. I couldn't accommodate him with the information as I hadn't it in stock. I could have made oath that I had not stolen anything therefore my vanity was not heard nor my spirit troubled. At bottom I supposed that he had mistaken another book for mine and was now getting himself into an untenable place and preparing sorrow for himself and triumph for me. We entered a bookstore and he asked for the innocence abroad and for the dainty little blue and gold edition of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes poems. He opened the books, exposed their dedications and said, read them. It is plain that the author of the second one stole the first one. Isn't it? I was very much ashamed and unspeakably astonished. We continued our walk but I was not able to throw any gleam of light upon that original question of his. I could not remember ever having seen Dr. Holmes' dedication. I knew the poems but the dedication was new to me. I did not get hold of the key to that secret until months afterwards. Then it came in a curious way and yet it was a natural way for the natural way provided by nature and the construction of the human mind for the discovery of a forgotten event is to employ another forgotten event for its resurrection. I received a letter from Reverend Dr. Ryzen who had been rector of the Episcopal Church in Virginia City in my time. In which letter Dr. Ryzen made reference to certain things which had happened to us in the Sandwich Island six years before. Among other things he made casual mention of the Honolulu hotel's poverty in the matter of literature. He did not see the bearing of the remark. It did not call anything to mind. But presently it did with a flash. There was but one book in Mr. Kirchhoff's hotel and that was the first volume of Dr. Holmes' Blue and Gold series. I had had a fortnight's chance to get well acquainted with its contents. For I had ridden around the big island, Hawaii, on horseback and brought back so many saddle boils as if there had been a duty on them would have bankrupt me to pay it. They kept me in my room unclothed and in persistent pain for two weeks with no company but seagars and a little volume of poems. Of course I read them almost constantly. I read them from beginning to end and then begun in the middle and read them both ways. In a word I read the book to rags and was infinitely grateful to the hand that wrote it. Here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do when daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time where one is merely reading for entertainment without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. It is a process which in the course of years dries all the juice out of a familiar verse of literature leaving nothing but the sapless husk behind. In that case you at least know the origin of the husk but in the case in point I apparently preserved the husk but presently forgot once it came. It lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or later then came forward when I needed a dedication and was promptly mistaken by me as a child of my own happy fancy. I was new. I was ignorant. The mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal. I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair imploring him in impassioned, I'm sticking two pages together hold on a minute, in impassioned language to believe that I never intended to commit this crime and was unaware that I had committed up until I was confronted with the awful evidence. I have lost his answer. I could have better afforded to lose an uncle of these I had a surplus many of them of no real value to me but the letter was beyond price, beyond uncle dumb and unspareable in it Dr. Holmes laughed the kindest and healiness laugh over the whole matter and at considerable length and in happy phrase assured me that there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism that I committed it every day that he committed it every day that every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens his mouth that all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings that no happy phrase of ours is ever quite original with us. There is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations that this slight change differentiates it from another man's manner of saying it stamps it with our special style and makes it our own for the time being all the rest of it be an old moldy antique and smelling of the breath of a thousand generations of them that have passed it over their teeth before. In the 30 odd years which have come and gone since then I have satisfied myself that what Dr. Holmes said was true. To go back a bit my experience as an author began early in 1867. I came to New York from San Francisco in the month of that year and presently Charles H. Webb who I had known in San Francisco as a reporter on the bulletin and afterward editor of the Californian suggested I publish a volume of sketches. I had bought a slender reputation to publish it on but I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the sketches together. I was loathed to do it myself for from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be ought to was is better perhaps though the most of the authorities differ as to this. Webb said I had some reputation in the Atlantic states but I knew quite well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. What there was of it rested upon the story of the jumpin frog. When Artemis Ward passed through California on a lecturing tour in 1864 or 1966 I told him the jumpin frog story in San Francisco and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher Carlton in New York to be used and padden out a small book which Artemis had prepared for the press and which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price which was to be charged for it. It reached Carlton in time but he didn't think much of it and was not willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book. He did not put it in the wastebasket but made Henry Clap a present of it and Clap used it to help fill out the funeral of his dying literary journal The Saturday Press. The jumpin frog appeared in the last number of that paper was the most joyous feature of the obsequies and was it once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It certainly had a wide celebrity and it still had it at the time I'm speaking of but I was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated it wasn't I I was still an obscurity. Webb undertook to collect the sketches he performed this office and then handed the results to me and I went to Colton's establishment with it. I approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire into my needs but when he found out I had come to sell a book and not to buy one his temperature fell 60 degrees and the old gold entrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three quarters of an inch and my teeth fell out. I merely asked the privilege of a word with Mr. Colton and was coldly informed that he was in his private office. Discouragements and difficulties followed but after a while I got by the frontier and entered the Holies of Holies. Now I remembered how I managed it. Webb had made an appointment for me with Carlton otherwise I should have gone over that frontier I don't know how. Colton rose and said briskly and aggressively well what can I do for you. I reminded him that I was here by appointment to offer my book for publication. He began to swell and went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a God about the second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken up and for two or three minutes I couldn't see him for the rain. It was words only words but they fell so densely that they darkened the atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand which comprehended the whole room and said books look at those shelves. Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me. I don't. Good morning. Twenty when years elapsed before I saw Carlton again I was then so journeyed with my family in Lucerne. He called on me shook hands cordially and said it once without any preliminaries. I am substantially an obscure person but I have a couple of such colossal distinctions to my credit that I am entitled to immortality to which I refused a book of yours and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the 19th century. It was a most handsome apology and I told him so and said it was a long delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any that could be devised. That during that lapse 21 years I had in fancy taken his life several times every year and always in new and increasingly cruel and in human ways. But that now I was pacified, appeased, happy even jubilant and that henceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again. I reported my adventures to web and he bravely said that not all the Carlton's in the universe should defeat that book. He would publish it himself on a ten percent royalty and so he did. I was out of money so I went down to Washington to see if I could earn enough there to keep me in bread and butter while I should write the book. I came across William Swinton brother of the historian and together we invented a scheme for our mutual sustenance. We became the fathers and originators of what is a common feature in newspaper world now, the syndicate and I could go on reading about that but I want to review some of the things that he did to support himself to become popular and to get published. First of all he took a trip and he wrote about the trip and the trip was published in various newspapers. Then when he returned after these articles were in the newspapers he lectured on the trip and made a great deal of money from his lecturing and then he compiled his writings in a collection and that was his first big book and here's the thing that few people know. He and Swinton were the originators of the syndicated newspaper column. He had his letters sent to rather obscure newspapers that were actually looking for articles written by people from Washington that had some kind of an established name. So all these things taken together writers should take heed. I will as best I can. I'm without a car right now but I will try to take a trip and I will try to write upon it and I'll try to get it in the local newspaper and see what happens. Well this is the Chamber Street Theater and I've been reading from the autobiography of Mark Twain. We want to thank our very creative people in the control room, Alex Silva-Satter and Bryce Parker who've done wonders with my polka dot socks and my polka dot blouse and my black and white shirt or vest or whatever it is that repeats that pattern. I thought I would do something different this week. I must have spent two maybe three minutes getting this fabulous costume together out of my fabulous wardrobe. Well this is Ruth Chambers with the Chamber Street Theater hoping all goes well with you and sending blessings your way that you fully deserve. Tune in and we'll see you next week. Bye bye now.