In today's newspaper, Mark Twain is noted briefly in a story about
Profiles in History, a company in Beverly Hills that buys and sells
autographed manuscripts (Timothy Appleby, "Making money from monikers,"
_Globe and Mail_ 16 May 1994, p. A10).  A table showing the company's top
15 sellers since 1970 has Mark Twain in fourth place in terms of the
average rate of return (just barely below Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee,
Thomas Edison, and George Gershwin).  Twain's entry reads thus:

                               Average rate of return
Dates sold   Prices realized   compounded annually
----------   ---------------   ----------------------
1970         $   55
1993         $1,500            15.46%

I trust that this statistic will be as comforting to you as it is to me.

Taylor Roberts