Exhibition, lecture highlight Twain's life in letters, business

Librarian and exhibition curator Lance Heidig and Anne Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, tour the Mark Twain exhibition in Kroch Library.

Despite his literary success and worldwide fame as Mark Twain, Samuel L. Clemens wanted to be a successful businessman -- but his subscription publishing venture and other endeavors all failed.

Twain's commercial enterprises are one aspect of the writer's life highlighted in the new Cornell Library exhibition "Known to Everyone, Liked by All: The Business of Being Mark Twain," commemorating the 100th anniversary of the author's death.

The exhibition features the collection of Susan Jaffe Tane, which includes rare first and foreign editions of his books, letters, periodicals, photographs and such examples of the Mark Twain brand as board games, five-cent cigar boxes and advertising signs bearing his name and likeness.

The exhibit is on display in the Hirshland Gallery, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library level 2B until Oct. 8.

"It's fair to say that being Mark Twain was Samuel L. Clemens' business," said librarian Lance Heidig, who curated the exhibition. "In some ways he was the first American celebrity. He cultivated an image."

"In Susan's collection, we essentially have A to Z with Mark Twain," Heidig said. "She has this very personal letter from 1870 [reflecting on] the start of his writing career, and the very last manuscript he ever wrote."

Rare books on display include "A Tramp Abroad," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "King Leopold's Soliloquy." The exhibition also includes newspaper articles and reviews of his public appearances. "He was as well-known in his lifetime as a public speaker as he was as a writer, and he used one to promote the other," Heidig said.

The exhibition also features photographs of Twain, his family and his octagonal study in Elmira, N.Y., and a display in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reference Room of newspaper items and other ephemera highlighting Twain's Cornell connections that Heidig uncovered while assembling the exhibition. He will lecture on Mark Twain's Cornell May 5 at Quarry Farm in Elmira.

Clemens probably wrote 50,000 letters in his lifetime -- which means he penned "20, 30, 40 letters a day," said Robert H. Hirst, curator of the Mark Twain Papers and general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California-Berkeley's Bancroft Library, in a lecture he gave April 23 to a full house in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium.

Collecting those letters is part of Hirst's life work, he said. "In 1985, we were finding one new letter a week. Now we're finding two new letters every week," he said. "How can that be? He is dead, isn't he?"

In his lecture, Hirst detailed the Mark Twain Project's massive trove of material, including about 11,000 letters written by the author and his immediate family and more than 17,000 letters addressed to them.

One gem of the collection: Envelopes that once contained "begging letters" from people who wanted Twain's signature. He annotated the envelopes with comments about the authors, such as "wants God knows what" and "idiot in Ireland."

"Ask yourself why we are able to read these at all. The answer is just one word long: collectors," Hirst said. Libraries, dealers and many others contribute to the preservation of materials, he added, but collections must start with the act of a single person deeming something worthy to save.

Gwen Glazer in Library Communications contributed to this article.