On Mar 4, 2008, at 3:43 PM, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Kent_Rasmussen?= wrote: > On another matter, Jerry suggests that Norman Rockwell was the only > artist > to depict the whitewashed fence accurately. I’m not sure this is > correct. > Aside from the fact that Rockwell’s illustration doesn’t match the > book’s > description of a fence nine feet high and thirty yards long (of course, > Henry Sweets has argued that those dimensions existed only in Tom’s > imagination), other illustrators (including Donald McKay) have > depicted the > fence with vertical boards. The claim that Rockwell was the only illustrator to visit Hannibal was a mistake, if I wrote it that way. Rockwell claimed in his book "My Adventures as an Illustrator" that he was the first one to visit, I believe. That would have been up until '35, of course. The illustrator I thought got the fence right was Williams, not Rockwell. To be faithful to Twain's words, the fence would have to be made of horizontal boards, not vertical boards as are usually depicted (the fence now at Twain's boyhood home has vertical boards). I'm basing that on the Chap. 2 sentence that comes right after the "Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high" that you mentioned. Tom "dipped his brush and passed it along the top-most plank". Now that seems to say that there are planks that are on top, and planks that are below them. In order for that to be the case, the boards would have to run horizontally, otherwise a plank would run from top to bottom, and could not be described as being "top-most". At least that's the way I read it. True Williams shows the fence around Tom's house in some places as having horizontal boards (with space between each row of planks like the fence around a Kentucky horse farm), and at other places as being the more commonly seen vertical arrangement (as where Tom is shown climbing over the fence to escape Aunt Polly). The fence is not depicted as being nine feet high, though, unless Tom was a 7 footer. I was very interested in your explanation of the Clemens - Twain name changes. I'm sure you're right. I suppose there was a reason for the change something like you described. In the case of Heritage, I was under the impression that they started out using the name Mark Twain when the books came out in the 30s, switched to Samuel L. Clemens in the mid 40s, and then went back to Mark Twain. That's only a guess (based on the fact that one of my "Clemens" editions has a notice that the book followed the law requiring reprints during the war to use less paper than the original ....... the book was made smaller by reducing the margins, but otherwise is the same). No printing year is in any of these books, although I've seen printing years in other Heritage books). Despite changing the author's name from Twain to Clemens (and back?), their introduction never changed, and refers to both Clemens (early in his life) and later the name Twain is used. I believe this book is still in print and is sold at both the Mark Twain House and the Boyhood Home (or it was a few years ago). I don't know what author's name is being used now. Jerry