Dear Friends,

On March 31st the latest issue of the Mark Twain Journal will be mailed by the printer to subscribing individuals and libraries. 

This 264-page double issue (Spring/Fall 2017) is guest edited by Joseph Csicsila. 

It features R. Kent Rasmussen's and Taylor Roberts's tributes to the newest Legacy Scholar, Barbara Schmidt. 

There are also memorial notices about Victor A. Doyno, Thomas K. Meier, Jack Rosenbalm, and Margaret Tenney.

Joseph Csicsila interviews Aaron and Adam Nee, the writer-directors of BAND OF ROBBERS (2015), a film homage to Mark Twain's two most famous novels. 

Other articles discuss ROUGHING IT, THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE, JOAN OF ARC, and NO. 44, THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER, as well as Twain's use of architecture and his fondness for the city of Hartford.

The MARK TWAIN JOURNAL is still only $15 for individual subscriptions and $30 for libraries (U.S. addresses only).  Subscriptions can be entered at www.marktwainjournal.com

Please encourage your campus library or local library to subscribe and maintain its subscription. Our journal is highly dependent on these library subscriptions. 

Unfortunately our library subscriptions are only two-fifths of what they were a few years ago as libraries have dropped their journal subscriptions and told their patrons to use internet databases instead. 

This has caused budgetary problems for our journal, even though it receives crucial assistance from the Mark Twain Foundation.

Consequently, as the editor and publisher since 2012, I have insisted that the various internet database firms renegotiate the agreements they reached with the previous editor and give us more favorable terms so that the journal can continue its eighty-year existence. (Its survival had become so imperiled by the declining subscriptions that we decided to publish only one giant double-issue for 2017 while we undertook these negotiations.)

I am relieved to report that all of the internet databases I contacted eventually elected to cooperate. Most of them will embargo our recent issues for at least two years, offering libraries a greater incentive to renew their subscriptions. One of the databases will continue to publish our most recent issues, but will help support the journal with an improved royalty payment. 

We are now feeling much more optimistic about the future prospects for the MARK TWAIN JOURNAL, which was founded in 1936 and was one of the earliest periodicals devoted to a single author. We will therefore return to the semiannual publication of two issues in 2018. 

Let me close by appealing to all of our readers to urge their libraries to subscribe. Even with these concessions by the database corporations, we are still very dependent on those year-to-year library subscriptions.

Cordially,
Alan Gribben
Editor and Publisher
MARK TWAIN JOURNAL: THE AUTHOR AND HIS ERA