The following is an explanatory note from the
forthcoming Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume
1, edited by the staff at the Mark Twain Project
and planned for publication by the University of California Press in 2010.
3.3 Davis's Selected Speeches,
I have forgotten]
No such series of books by Davis has been found. Possibly Stevenson (or
Clemens) misremembered the name of William Brisbane Dick (1826-1901),
coproprietor of Dick and Fitzgerald, a publishing firm founded in 1858.
Compilations of prose and poetry, as well as books for entertainment or
self-improvement, bulked large in their catalog, which included Dick's
Recitations and Readings, American Card Player, Dick's Comic Dialogues,
Dick's Irish Dialect Recitations, Dick's Art of Wrestling, and Dick's
Society Letter-Writer for Ladies, all issued 1866 and 1887. In 1867 Clemens
himself had considered offering the publishers a collection of his
Sacramento Union letters from the Sandwich Islands (Cox 2000[bib32204],
85-86; N&J1, 176-77 n. 166).
Harriet Smith, MTP
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