This is a request to all fellow members of the Mark Twain Forum.  For the
last half year I've been building a WorldWideWeb site called "Mark Twain in
His Times."  It attempts to bring together the resources of the Barret
Collection here at the Univ. of Virginia, the capabilities of computers and
the Internet, and my own preoccupation with Mark Twain's career.  It's still
in progress, but already includes searchable e-texts of five major works
(including Innocents Abroad, which hasn't been fully digitized before), and
as much ancillary material as we've had time to find, scan and organize
(including sales prospectuses, advertisements, reviews, illustrations and so
on).  It also includes "exhibits" on how Twain's work was marketed, on Twain
on stage, and on "Twain himself."  We're trying to make the site as useful
as
possible to students of Mark Twain at all levels.  I'm asking for help with
that.

I'll be grateful to any of you who can take the time to look at the site and
give me any kind of response.  Praise is what I'm most looking for, of
course, but I'll be just as interested in criticisms, suggestions,
corrections and so on.  There is probably an embarrassing number of errors
in
the site -- everything from typos to getting crucial facts wrong.  All help
straightening out what's already there will be gratefully received and
acknowledged.

I'd also really like to get your help in adding to the site.  It would be
great, for example, to bring together all the contemporary reviews that can
be located of the Twain texts that are currently in the site, so if you
have,
or have any leads about, any additional contemporary magazine or newspaper
reviews of Innocents Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Connecticut Yankee,
Pudd'nhead Wilson, or the Vandal Abroad and Twins of Genius lecture tours,
I'd be very grateful if you'd send them along.  I'll explicitly acknowledge
all such contributions.

There are lots of other ways in which I hope to tap into the collective
knowledge and enthusiasm of the Forum, so I should warn you that I'll be
back
in the future with follow up requests.  (I've had only a little success, for
example, tracking down details about Frank Mayo's dramatization of
Pudd'nhead, so if anyone has information about the script of the play, the
dates and places it was performed, or additional reviews from its various
productions, I'd love to hear about it.)  But I don't want this first
request
to become too long, or too daunting, so I'll stop here.

The address of the site is http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton.  Please
check it out, and let me know what you think.  My e-mail address is
[log in to unmask], or you can mail me directly from the site.  I can use a
lot
of help with this project, so I look forward to hearing from you.

Steve Railton
Univ. of Virginia