Two articles have appeared in the _San Francisco Examiner_ in the
last few days about a severe financial crisis at the Mark Twain
Project that has left it with only two month's operating expenses.

As most members of this list know, the Mark Twain Project is
publishing the definitive scholarly edition of his works, including
corrected annotated editions of well-known books and previously
unpublished materials such as five volumes (so far) of letters, three
volumes (so far) of notebooks, and other manuscripts that were left
unpublished when Twain died.  Its work has been critically important
in advancing Twain scholarship and in making Twain's writings
available to both scholars and the broader community.

The articles are available online at:

UC Twain Project Out of Steam and Headed for Sandbar (July 11)
http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/examiner/article.cgi?year=1997&month=
07&day=10&article=NEWS899.dtl
(you'll have to cut and paste these URLs, I can't fit them on one
line)

Cut in Twain (July 13)
http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/examiner/article.cgi?year=1997&month=
07&day=13&article=EDITORIAL2299.dtl

The second article is an editorial that concludes with information
about how to make donations to offset the cuts in federal and private
funding the Project is experiencing:

"The money runs out in two months. Contributions will help (send
tax-deductible checks to the Bancroft Library / Mark Twain Project at
the University of California, Berkeley CA 94720, or call 510
/ 642-6480).    What's needed, of course, is a long-term
commitment by Congress or another millionaire before the
team of scholars scatters and the precious papers of one of
America's greatest writers go back into storage."

In addition, people can order Mark Twain T-Shirts (sales benefit the
Mark Twain Project) using the form available from the Forum's web
site at

http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/forum/gifs/mtpshirt.html

For anyone not familiar with the Project's work, its home page is at

http://library.berkeley.edu/BANC/MTP/

and an article about its work from the _Daily Californian_ (1995),
"Organizing Mark Twain's Genius," is available at

http://www.dailycal.org/Issues/12.05.95/twain.txt

Jim Zwick