A reviewer is needed for the following book:

          Mark Twain.  _Roughing It_.  Revised edition.  Eds. Harriet
          Elinor Smith and Edgar Marquess Branch.  Berkeley: U of
          California Press, 1993.  Vol. 2, Works of Mark Twain (a
          publication of the Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft
          Library).  xxxviii+1072 pp.  Cloth.  ISBN 0-520-08498-5.

     In addition to considering this book on its own terms, the reviewer
would be expected to compare this revised edition to the original 1972
edition (eds. Franklin R. Rogers and Paul Baender), noting the changes,
improvements, etc.  The deadline for posting the review to the Forum would
be two months after you receive it; you would likely get it within the
next week or two, and so the deadline would be somewhere around July 1.

     The first edition should be available in most large libraries.
However, I do have a paperback of the first edition (ISBN 0-520-02478-8)
that I will also send to the reviewer in order to facilitate the
comparison between editions.

     Before you volunteer to review this book, please bear in mind that
book reviews on the Mark Twain Forum should tend more toward being of
publishable quality rather than being merely brief, casual comments, as
one often finds in the regular e-mail discussion.  To see what I have in
mind, please take a look at the only official book review that has yet
appeared here (my review of the _MT Encyclopedia_).  Although that
particular review could definitely be improved, it will give you an idea
of the kind of effort and knowledge that should be brought to bear on a
book review for the MT Forum.  To get a copy, retrieve the June 1993
notebook file by sending a message to either <[log in to unmask]> or
<[log in to unmask]> containing the single line:

          GET TWAIN-L LOG9306

Please be careful to send this command to LISTSERV, not to TWAIN-L.

     If you're still interested in reviewing _Roughing It_, please send me
a message stating:

     1.   Your complete snail-mail address where the books should be
          sent.

     2.   An explanation of why you're interested in reviewing _Roughing
          It_ and/or in what respect you're especially qualified to do
          so.

These general calls for book reviewers elicit many responses, and I feel
badly that I have only one copy of the book to give.  Whatever you write
in response to number 2 above, then, will be important in helping me to
decide to whom I should send this book.  However, it's more important that
you be knowledgeable about the aspect of Mark Twain and MT scholarship
that's relevant to the task at hand, not that you be famous--so please do
volunteer if you feel you could make a nice job of this book review.

     Your principal reward for writing the review will be, as usual, the
gratitude of Mark Twain Forum subscribers.  Of course, you also get to
keep both editions of _Roughing It_.

Taylor Roberts
University of British Columbia