Thought the group might be interested in the following – from a long time
lurker. I apologize if the formatting isn't right
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-hartford-twain-0904-20110903,0,75
71174,full.story

Regards,

Larry Dann

By MARK SPENCER, [log in to unmask] Hartford Courant
10:29 p.m. EDT, September 3, 2011
HARTFORD ——
Anyone who saw the two women on their hands and knees in the library of
the Mark Twain House in March might have thought they were cleaning.
Chief curator Patti Philippon and curatorial associate Mallory Howard were,
in fact, doing a bit of dusting. The two women are the Twain museum's entire
curatorial staff, and when it comes to passing menial tasks down the chain,
they run out of links fast.
But their primary mission was to inventory the books in the library of the
Victorian Gothic house on Farmington Avenue where Samuel Clemens, who
published as Mark Twain, and his family lived from 1874 to 1891

As volunteer tour guides patiently explain to the 70,000 people who visit
the home each year, the books in the ornate library are of Clemens' era and
interests, but are not actually the valuable editions he owned or had
personally read.
"That turned out not to be the case," said Howard.
As they rummaged through the stand-in books, Howard and Philippon were
stunned to find a long unaccounted-for book that had in fact been owned, or
at least read, by Clemens. The book had appeared on previous inventories so
the staff knew it existed, but as in many American homes, they didn't
exactly know where it was.
"It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen very often and when it does it's
just amazing," Philippon said.

While the two women were thrilled to find the book, Howard hit the literary
jackpot when she later examined the copy of "Boat Life In Egypt and Nubia,"
a travel book by William C. Prime that Clemens detested.
There in the margins of many pages were scribbled notes, often acerbic or
sarcastic, that Howard was almost certain had been written by Clemens as he
read the book more than a century ago.
While perhaps mundane to most people, the discovery is the kind of thing
that quickens the pulse of literary types. Appropriately called marginalia,
scholars study it to get a glimpse into the thoughts of great writers.
"These are his own off-the-cuff, unedited thoughts," Philippon said. "It
gives people an insight into him and what he really thought."
"Boat Life" occupies a unique niche in both Clemens' career and his
relationship with Hartford. Twain's "Innocents Abroad," published in 1869,
is his humorous account of a boat trip he took two years before through
Europe and the Middle East.
It was his biggest-selling book during his lifetime and brought him to
Hartford for the first time, where his publisher was based. And he devoted
an entire chapter to savagely satirizing Prime and his book. Scholars have
lusted to see Clemens' copy.
They will not be disappointed. After one overwrought passage, Clemens wrote,
"This person was drunk."

Howard is intimately familiar with Clemens marginalia. She had worked as a
tour guide and intern at the Mark Twain House & Museum before being hired
after graduating last year with a bachelor's degree in American history
from Central Connecticut State University.
As an intern, Howard was assigned the task of reviewing a collection of
about 300 Clemens-owned books it acquired in the mid-1990s and for the first
time cataloging the marginalia. Howard knows that most people would find it
tedious going through thousands of pages in hundreds of books searching for
every pencil stroke and deciphering nearly illegible comments.
But she is the kind of person who can, unprompted, interrupt a conversation
with a wistful, "Oh, I love marginalia," and said she couldn't wait to get
started.
"I do geek out," Howard said. "This project was perfect for me."

To confirm the "Boat Life" find, scans of the marginalia were sent to Twain
experts around the country.
Alan Gribben, a Twain library and marginalia expert at Auburn University in
Montgomery, Ala., responded simply, "Wow."
Robert Hirst, chief editor of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at
the University of California at Berkeley, has been studying the author for
45 years and instantly recognized his marginalia. For years experts have
wondered what happened to Clemens' copy of "Boat Life."
"I've been doing this for a long time," Hirst said. "It's still exciting."
The Mark Twain Papers & Project is now working on a new edition of
"Innocents Abroad." Hirst said Clemens thought Prime was a "phony,
sentimental traveler" and the marginalia will provide insights into what
rankled him so much.

"Mark Twain almost never read a book he didn't write in," Hirst said. "He
has a conversation with the book in the margins."
Clemens repeatedly skewers Prime's inflated sense of self-importance, at one
point writing, "And so he goes about, being mistaken everywhere for God."
The museum's staff has its favorite marginalia from other books, including
Clemens' notes in a copy of "Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men." He would
scrawl a comment, with an arrow to show where it should be inserted, or add
it to the end of a sentence, shown in italic.
Printed in the title page of the book is "Translated From the Greek into
rotten English by Jon Dryden." Below that is, "The Whole Carefully revised
and corrected by an ass."
Were he alive today, it's easy to see Clemens as an unrepentant tagger, a
large black Sharpie in the pocket of his white suit jacket, furtively
looking over his shoulder as he vented his ire on Hartford signs and
billboards.

Twain remains enormously popular. He had ordered that his autobiography not
be published until 100 years after his death. When published last year by
the University of California Press, it was a best-seller, hardly expected
for a 760-page tome by a long dead writer.
Despite generations of admonitions from teachers and parents that writing in
books is vandalism, editions with Clemens marginalia are highly prized by
collectors, fetching $5,000 and up, Hirst said.
His copy of "Boat Life" is now safely enshrined in a specially designed,
acid-free box in the museum's temperature- and humidity-controlled special
collection room, under Howard's loving care.
Her enthusiasm is still obvious as she dons white cotton gloves, carefully
places the book in black wedges to cradle it and starts turning pages in
search of more clues. Often as she is squinting to decipher the great man's
scrawls, an image comes to her of Clemens propped up in bed.
"I totally picture him smoking a cigar, pen in hand, mumbling to himself and
shaking his head."
Howard will present a lecture, "Mark Twain in the Margins," at 5:30 p.m. on
Sept. 14 at the museum, the first in the "Trouble Begins at 5:30" series,
which will run every Wednesday through Oct. 12.