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