This discovery in a 1992 book will be old hat to a few of you, but
I  thought it worth passing on.

It's no secret  that Joe Goodman, Twain's Virginia City editor in the early
1860s, eventually worked  on the Maya inscriptions.   I had read brief,
dismissive accounts of Goodman's contributions in a couple of books.

But yesterday I was reading Michael D. Coe's excellent BREAKING THE MAYA
CODE  (Thames and Hudson, 1992) and came on 3 pages devoted to Goodman,
plus several passing mentions.

To me, Coe's book is a model of accessible scholarship--even-handed.
clearly written, human, very accessible to the  lay reader. His subject is
as much the code-breakers as the Maya glyphs themselves.  Coe's work  is a
history of interesting and quirky personalities,  feuds, misdirections, etc.

Coe raps Goodman's knuckles gently for claiming a breakthrough that he
thinks Goodman knew very well had been  achieved by an earlier German
researcher.  But he then  goes on to say that Joseph Goodman has never
received the credit he deserves for being the first to work out that
19  Maya glyphs were the exact equivalents of a 1-through-19 bar and
dot  numbering system also used by the Maya.   (A crude equivalent would be
the future archaeologist who discovers that the mysterious words "eight,"
"fourteen" etc. were  simply another way we had of recording "8," "14,"
etc.)

Much more  important--though his work was laughed off  at the time--Goodman
was the first to match  the enormously elaborate Maya calendar with the
Western calendar:  Until a paper Joe published  in 1905, scholars had no
way to equate  the Maya date of any  event with a date like 872 A.D.

Coe's pages (mainly pp. 111-115) include a good Twain Autobiography quote
about Goodman, and (as cited  from Paine's biography), Goodman's final
wisecrack at his late friend's  expense:  "I am grieved--and yet glad that
Mark made so good an ending. God knows how mortally afraid I was that
somebody would land him in a dime museum before the finish."

I never cease to enjoy  the odd twists lives can take.  Goodman was a
Virginia City and San Francisco editor who went on to become a grower of
raisins in Fresno.  Then, in the 1880s, his interests turned to the Maya.

Mark Coburn