In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

626 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 188 · When the American Booksellers Association convened in New York, all the speakers at the annual dinner were writers: Burgess Johnson, Will Irwin, Holman Day, and Mark Twain. The latter's speech is incomplete. According to next day's Times, he also talked about using his royalties to build afarmhouse where he expected to take a vacation ofthirty orforty years beforefinishing the five books he was working on. Dinner Speech American Booksellers Association Dinner, Aldine Rooms, New York, May 20, 1908 This annual gathering of booksellers from all over America comes together ostensibly to eat and drink, but really to discuss business; therefore I am required to talk shop. I am required to furnish a statement of the indebtedness under which I lie to you gentlemen for your help in enabling me to earn my living. For something over forty years I have acquired my bread by print, beginning with The Innocents Abroad, followed at intervals of a year or so byRoughing It, Tom Sawyer, Gilded Age, and so on. For thirty-six years my books were sold by subscription. You are not interested in those years, but only in the four which have since followed. The books passed into the hands of my present publishers at the beginning of 1904, and you then became the providers of my diet. I think I may say, without flattering you, that you have done exceedingly well by me. Exceedingly well is not too strong a phrase, since the official statistics show that in four years you have sold twice as many volumes of my venerable books as my contract with my publishers bound you and them to sell in five years. To your sorrow you are aware that frequently, much too frequently, when a book gets to be five or ten years old its annual sale shrinks to two or three hundred copies, and after an added ten or twenty years ceases to sell. But you sell thousands of my mossbacked old books every year-the youngest of them being books that range from fifteen to twenty-seven years old, and the oldest reaching back to thirty-five and forty. By the terms of my contract my publishers had to account to me for MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 627 50,000 volumes per year for five years, and pay me for them whether they sold them or not. It is at this point that you gentlemen come in, for it was your business to unload 250,000 volumes upon the public in five years if you possibly could. Have you succeeded? Yes, you have-and more. For in four years, with a year still to spare, you have sold the 250,000 volumes, and 240,000 besides. Your sales have increased each year. In the first year you sold 90,328; in the second year, 104,851; in the third, 133,975; in the fourth year-which was last year-you sold 160,000. The aggregate for the four years is 500,000 volumes, lacking 11,000. Of the oldest book, The Innocents Abroad-now forty years old-you sold upward of 46,000 copies in the four years; ofRoughing It-now thirty-eight years old, I think-you sold 40,334; ofTom Sawyer, 41,000. And so on. And there is one thing that is peculiarly gratifying to me: the Personal Recollections ofJoan ofArc is a serious book; I wrote it for love, and never expected it to sell, but you have pleasantly disappointed me in that matter. In your hands its sale has increased each year. In 1904 you sold 1,726 copies; in 1905,2,445; in 1906,5,381; and last year, 6,574. Text / Composite, based upon: "Mark Twain Gives Thanks," Times, May 21, 1908; "Booksellers" in MTS(10):218-20; and MTS(23): 375-77. ...

Share