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Grolier Club Exhibitions

Clemens the Writer

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For Clemens, writing humor was serious business. He studied books that inspired and informed his own writing and annotated his copies with his thoughts. These books from Clemens’ library evidence the careful attention to detail that went into the creation of even the most whimsical of Mark Twain’s writings. The tools and trappings of his writing process provide further insight into the man behind the pseudonym.

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Personalized burlap bag. [N.p.: ca. 1900-1910].

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[Samuel Clemens, former owner]. Williams No. 6 typewriter. [New York: 1908.]   

Clemens famously disliked typewriters, finding them “full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones,” but he owned several throughout his career. This Williams “grasshopper” typewriter (called such because of the long-legged design that allowed an author to view their work as they wrote it) was one of the last that he purchased. Following her father’s death in 1910, Clara Clemens gifted these items to Harry B. Iles, the superintendent and groundskeeper at Stormfield, and they remained in his family through 1982. 

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[Samuel Clemens, former owner]. Gesteckpfiefe [tobacco pipe]. [Germany]: undated. 

Clemens was a heavy smoker, though he preferred cigars. His secretary Isabel Lyon gifted him this two-piece German pipe by, but he purportedly never smoked from it. 

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Moncure Conway. Autobiography: Memories and Experiences. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904. 

Clemens profusely annotated his copy of American abolitionist Moncure Conway’s Autobiography. His notes, such as “I seem to have met most of the people mentioned in this book” on page 277 of volume 1, evidence the early stirrings of Twain’s autobiographical recollections; he would publish the Autobiography of Mark Twain in 1906. 

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Stereoview of Mark Twain writing in bed. New York: Underwood & Underwood, 1906.  

This stereoscopic photograph shows “the great humorist ‘Mark Twain’ (S.L. Clemens) and his peculiar method of work.” 

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H. Allingham. and D. Radford, eds. William Allingham: A Diary. London: Macmillan and Co., 1907.

Clara Clemens gave her father this copy of Irish poet William Allingham’s memoir for Christmas in 1907. The book contains several marginal notes in Clemens’s hand throughout, recording his thoughts as he read. Ever ready with a quick quip, Clemens amusingly jotted “Oh damn!” next to a blot of spilled ink on page 197. 

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[Samuel Clemens, former owner]. Conklin’s self-filling pen. Toledo, Ohio: Conklin Pen Co., ca. 1903. 

The Conklin Pen Co. of Toledo, Ohio, featured Mark Twain in its advertisement for this self-filling pen, quoting him as saying: “I prefer it to ten other fountain pens because it caries its own filler in its own stomach and I can’t mislay it, even by art and intention. I also prefer it because it is a profanity-saver; it cannot roll off the desk.” Conklin continues to use Twain for promotional purposes today; each of their fountain pens is engraved with his name along the band. 

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Mark Twain. A True Story, and the Recent Carnival of Crime. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877. 

Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” tells the story of “Aunt Rachel,” is based on incidents in the life of Mary Ann Cord ("Auntie Rachel"), a formerly enslaved woman who worked as a cook for Twain's sister-in-law at Quarry Farm in Elmira. 

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William Still. The Underground Rail Road. A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc. Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in the Efforts for freedom, as related by themselves and others, or witnessed by the author; together with Sketches of Some of the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers, of the Road. Philadelphia: Wm. Still, 1883. 

Clemens’s father-in-law Jervis Langdon was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, helping people escape enslavement in the South. This is Clemens’s copy of a history of a historical account written by William Still, a leading Black abolitionist hailed as “the father of the Underground Rail Road,” collecting firsthand accounts of formerly enslaved people’s journeys to freedom. In a long autograph note, Clemens adds a story from the Langdon family recounting the story of Mrs. Luckett and her daughter, two formerly enslaved women who escaped from Richmond to Elmira, New York.