The following review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kent Rasmussen.
~~~~~

_Roughing It_. By Mark Twain. Peruse Press, 2015. Pp. 414. ISBN
978-0692414309. Softcover. $19.99.


_History of the Big Bonanza_. By De Quille, Dan (William Wright).
Peruse Press, 2013. Pp. 426. ISBN 978-0615922447. Softcover. $16.99.


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 Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
 Kent Rasmussen

Copyright (c) 2015 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published
or redistributed in any medium without permission.


These two handsome and lavishly illustrated books are good examples of
an idea so useful and so simple, it is surprising it has not been
employed more often. Each volume contains its book's complete original
text and adds more than 100 historical photographs, drawings, and
maps. In the absence of any kind of textual annotations, the new
illustrations might be seen as a visual form of commentary.


The illustrations in the first edition of _Roughing It_ (1872) are
mostly line drawings rendered by illustrators, such as True Williams,
who never saw the scenes they illustrated, unless in photographs.
While their often crude drawings complement the text's eccentric
characters and amplify its comic moments, they do little to show
people and places as they actually appeared during Mark Twain's time
in the West. The photographs in the Peruse edition of _Roughing It_
thus go a long way toward making up for that deficiency. Their range
of subject matter is vast. In addition to photographs of prominent
persons mentioned in the text, they include 19th century photographs
and paintings of stagecoaches, trains, and Pony Express riders;
mountain and desert scenery; Indians; Salt Lake City, Carson City,
Aurora, Virginia City, and San Francisco; Lake Tahoe and Mono Lake;
prospectors, mines, and ore mills; the steamer _Ajax_; Hawaiian
scenes; and even the Allen "pepper pot" pistol and a tarantula. All
these pictures and a number of maps greatly enrich the text, but a
notable deficiency of this Peruse volume is its failure to identify
specific picture sources. However, the captions of almost all
illustrations give their dates. Many of the photographs were taken
after Mark Twain's time in the West, but it is gratifying to see
pictures of Virginia City, San Francisco, and a few other sites, taken
when he was in those places.


Of the 300 illustrations in the first edition of _Roughing It_, only a
handful are reproduced in the Peruse edition. It makes sense to
reprint Horace Greeley's scrawled letter (p. 345), but two other
repeated illustrations are curiosities: True Williams's drawing of
Brigham Young's crowded polygamous bed (p. 92) and Roswell Morse
Shurtleff's caricature of future senator William Stewart wearing a
pirate eye patch (p. 211). The latter is an especially curious choice,
as it faces a page with Mathew Brady's 1864 photograph of the real
Stewart.


Dan De Quille's _History of The Big Bonanza_ is available in a number
of modern reprint editions, but the Peruse edition may be the only one
that is illustrated. It certainly is the only edition with added
illustrations. In 1964, Alfred A. Knopf published a fine edition with
a new introduction by Oscar Lewis. Though not a facsimile edition of
the original 1877 American Publishing Company edition, it contains
most of the original book's illustrations. As with Peruse's _Roughing
It_ edition, the _The Big Bonanza_ edition has more than 100
historical photographs, drawings, and maps not appearing in the
original book. As one would expect from a book focusing on mining in
Nevada, these illustrations are mostly of mine-related scenes, with a
good number of photographs from the early 1860s showing mining and
milling equipment. In contrast to the _Roughing It_ volume, this book
identifies the sources of all its illustrations.


In addition to its new illustrations, each Peruse book has a very
substantial index. The one in _Roughing It_ is especially welcome, as
its book is probably the first edition of _Roughing It_ ever indexed.
At least one earlier edition of _The Big Bonanza_ has an index--the
1964 Knopf edition. The Knopf index is usefully annotated, but the
index in the Peruse edition appears to have about three times as many
entries.


_The Big Bonanza_ volume also has another added feature: a four-page
"prologue" of what the publisher elsewhere describes as "select droll
barbs between Dan De Quille and Mark Twain extracted from 1864
editions of the _Territorial Enterprise_." This prologue is not
explained inside the volume itself and may confuse readers because it
is placed within the book's main text, immediately after Mark Twain's
"Introductory" and the author's even briefer "Preface." Some readers
will doubtless conclude it is part of the original book. Indeed,
another curious omission in both books is the absence of any kind of
editorial explanation of the books' special contents or how their
pictures were selected. An editor named Mark Diederichsen is
identified on both books' copyright pages, but his role in their
production is not further explained.


 Despite the caveats expressed here, the Peruse volumes are welcome
additions to the constantly growing shelf of reprints of books by Mark
Twain and his associates. It is to be hoped that the publisher is
planning similar editions of Mark Twain's other travel books. _Life on
the Mississippi_ would lend itself especially well to a similar
treatment.