Thank you very much for this. I was only slightly acquainted with Mr. Hirst, but he did come and participate in the 16-hour continuous reading on the Sesquitennial in San Francisco, at the Potrero Hill Branch of the PL, and read a bit with us. He was pretty good - glad he's publishing his voice! He and assistant editor Rob Browning, who'd worked with me on the event more closely, even dug out a couple never-published items for the night. Five+ years ago, they produced, at Cal's Blackhawk Museum (a suburb), the finest multi-media exhibition on an author, or maybe anybody else once alive, that I've ever witnessed. I'd delayed my trip to Poland to teach by a few days to go to the opening, and and it damned well worth the delay. Occasionally I write to Rob to resurrect the show and bring it to Europe. I hope he and the Project are still considering it. Carl Nolte, the Chronicle writer, fails to note that The Chronicle, for which he writes, was a different sort of rag in those days. It was a professional program of a theatre, mostly with booked acts, called The Dramatic Chronicle. The owners -two brothers who'd borrowed a $20 gold coin to publish the first one, I read, printed brag pieces about the current and coming shows, but got hold of a telegraph terminal and threw in some of the daily news, scooping nightly the Call and other Dailies, who didn't print til morning. It became popular when it broke the news of the Lincoln assassination and a few other goodies, and more or less separated from the speficic theatre for which it was the PR organ. When Clemens lost his SF Call reporting job, he got picked up by The Dramatic Chronicle -- as its first full time drama critic! His reviews were a howl, generally, but upset a goodly number of the snooty opera lovers with lines like "the appointments are very fine indeed, but the cast are miserably deficient." The European opera Mazeppa, with a real horse on stage, got one of his really choice reviews. (The website as listed, didn't get me to the article directly, incidentally. It got me to The Chron, but then I had to do another search for Twain. Then I sent Carl Nolte a note of thanks, and asked him to send the set here to Poland, and that they should also print them on CD, making repeating a story easier while commuting, or telecommuting. The tapes cost only $20, the full article says.) Richard R in Lodz