There's a flaw in Rodney's reasoning. He's conflating stats for both the 
Jumping Frog and Twain's later collected sketches (which followed the 
publication of Innocents Abroad). The first Canadian edition of Jumping Frog 
did not appear until 1870 (in a single small edition), the same year IA was 
published in Canada in at least three editions and two type-settings. 
Rodney's checklist of foreign editions of Twain's works is woefully 
incomplete and spotty, but it would be interesting to compare an accurate 
listing of every printing and reprinting of his early works. A comparison of 
edition sizes would be critical, but editions sizes are known only for some 
of the Hotten and Chatto editions, and those don't tell the whole story. A 
comparison of the reviews each book attracted would also be revealing, but 
it would be very important to distinguish between the Jumping Frog and later 
collections of his sketches (1870, 1874, 1875, 1879, 1880, etc.). You would 
also have to compare the rate of spread of JF before and after the 
appearance of IA in 1869 to get a sense of which book was really carrying 
his fame the furthest. Twain himself killed the 1867 edition of JF in 1870 
after five printings whose sales totaled 4,000 copies. IA appeared in 1869 
and in its first year had gone through at least four large printings, with 
sales many times larger than JF in America, not to mention English and 
Canadian sales. It gets complicated. JF certainly introduced Twain to 
European readers, but I would argue that IA became the bestseller--the coat, 
if you will--whose tails carried his other writings along and spread his 
fame far beyond the notoriety of the JF.

Kevin
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-----Original Message----- 
From: Holger Kersten
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 7:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Twain's fame/notoriety in Europe

"Mark Twain's first book, /The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, and Other Sketches/, published in 1867 in both the United States
and Great Britain and followed shortly by Canadian and Australian
editions, immediately captured an international audience with its droll
and colloquial title story. During these earliest years as a free-lance
writer and traveling correspondent, Twain turned out many "sketches" and
anecdotal [xxix] short stories in successive editions that rapidly won him
popularity among Anglo-American readers. At least eleven American and
Canadian editions and twenty-six British editions appeared before 1880. By
1889 these collections multiplied to some seventy-three editions since
1867, certainly among the best-sellers of that period. Their popularity
spread to the Continent with translations into Danish, German, and Swedish
in 1874, followed by nine editions in each of these languages by 1889.
Twain's stories were further translated into Polish in 1881 and Russian in
1888."

Robert M. Rodney. /Mark Twain International: A Bibliography and
Interpretation of his Worldwide Popularity/. Westport Conn: Greenwood
Press, 1982: xxviii-xxix.


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Holger Kersten
Magdeburg, Germany