The basic outline of the story is true, but that writer garbles his facts. 
Only the earliest prospectuses contained the ribald drawing, and sales 
agents were instructed to remove the page and mail it to the publisher or 
else their orders would not be honored. It was not an act of revenge by 
Kemble for rejected drawings. No copies of the published book have the 
ribald state of the drawing and there is no evidence that any ever did. 
Copies were corrected before some sheets were collated and sewn (by 
replacing the entire gathering in which the illustration appeared), and 
others were corrected after some sets of sheets had been collated and sewn 
(by use of a cancel) but before any sheets were cased into bindings. Some 
sets of sheets that were set aside very early for leather bindings before 
the illustration plate was altered by somebody in the print shop using an 
awl actually have the first state of the plate before the alteration was 
made. All copies in the blue and green cloth bindings have the corrected 
state of the illustration. No copies of the book have the ribald state.

It's a bit of an overstatement to claim it nearly derailed the book. It 
generated some publicity and gave the publisher a chance to wax 
sanctimonious about correcting the problem.

It's not a new discovery either. Twain's bibliographer Merle Johnson wrote 
about it in 1910, 1935, and 1939, and so did others, and it's recorded in 
the Bibliography of American Literature, volume II (1957).

I wrote about it at length, correcting errors of fact and speculative 
nonsense, in a 1998 article in Firsts Magazine whose text you can access at 
abaa.org or through my articles at academia.edu.

Kevin
@
Mac Donnell Rare Books
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Austin TX 78730
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arianne" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, July 21, 2013 6:54 PM
Subject: Illustration problem: true?


>I hadn't heard this before, so don't know if it is true or not.
>
> http://mentalfloss.com/article/31107/crudely-drawn-penis-almost-derailed-huckleberry-finn
>
> -- 
> Arianne Laidlaw
>
>
>
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