Clemens, Samuel L. Autograph letter signed, 17 December....

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Clemens, Samuel L. Autograph letter signed, 17 December. Autograph letter signed ("Saml. L. Clemens"), 2 pages (4.5 x 7 in.; 114 x 178 mm.), on two separate leaves of "SLC" monogrammed stationery, Hartford, 17 December, no year (1872), written to "the Father of the American Cartoon", Thomas Nast. Page 2 has a small section of paper loss on left margin with both pages exhibiting mounting remnants. Following the publication of The Innocents Abroad, chronicling his travels to Europe and the Middle East, Mark Twain writes "The Father of the American Cartoon", Thomas Nast, celebrating his work (including his drawing of the Sphinx) in hopes that his publisher will hire Nast to illustrate his English book. Clemens writes in full: My Dear Nast-I thank you heartily for your kindness to me & to my friend Charley. The Almanac 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 portrayed upon the space of one's thumb-nail, so to speak; & that sphynx 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." Ys Ever Saml. L. Clemens. Mark Twain traveled to Europe and the Mid-east, including Egypt, in 1867 aboard the steamship "Quaker City". Somehow he had convinced the San Francisco Alta California newspaper to pay for the trip, with the promise that he would provide them with articles for their readers. Their confidence was rewarded with a series of travel essays later edited to become Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrim's Progress (published 1869), Twain's first published book, and the most popular during his lifetime. ...my friend Charley, to whom Clemens refers is Charles M. Fairbanks, 17-year-old son Mary Mason Fairbanks, who was Twain's friend, mentor and "mother" on the Quaker City voyage described in The Innocents Abroad. At Twain's request, Nast had entertained Charley in his studio, and their meeting developed into a lifelong friendship. The two collaborated in 1892-93 on the short-lived Nast's Weekly (Fairbanks supplying the text, Nast the pictures). The Almanac is Th. Nast's Illustrated Almanac for 1873, which contained "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" by Mark Twain and "New-Year's Calls" by Eli Perkins (Melville D. Langdon). Clemens was justified in describing it as Perkins's of Doestick's celebrated Niagara drunk - a piece well known at the time, by Mortimer N. Thomson, a humorist writing as "Q.K. Philander Doesticks," in which Doesticks describes his own visit to Niagara Falls, during which he makes frequent pauses for beer, with predictable results. Clemens' trip to England in 1872 was intended to gather materials for a new book he planned to write on England and the English (his English book as referred to in this letter). However, he struggled to find the right sort of material, as Fred Kaplan notes in the biography The Singular Mark Twain: "He tried, though, to 'see as many people' as he could, rather than sights. 'If I could take notes of all I hear said, I should make a most interesting book.' Local customs, as always, intrigued him. The more he liked England and the English, though, the less sustainable seemed the kind of book he had intended to write." Provenance: The Library, Correspondence and Original Cartoons of the Last Thomas Nast, Merwin-Clayton sale of 2-3 April 1906, lot 244.