By the terms of my contract my publishers had to account to me for,
50,000 volumes per year for five years, and pay me for them whether they
sold them or not. It is at this point that you gentlemen come in, for it
was your business to unload 250,000 volumes upon the public in five years
if you possibly could. Have you succeeded? Yes, you have--and more.
For in four years, with a year still to spare, you have sold the 250,000
volumes, and 240,000 besides.
Your sales have increased each year. In the first year you sold 90,328;
in the second year, 104,851; in the third, 133,975; in the fourth year
--which was last year--you sold 160,000. The aggregate for the four
years is 500,000 volumes, lacking 11,000.
Of the oldest book, The Innocents Abroad,--now forty years old--you sold
upward of 46,000 copies in the four years; of Roughing It--now
thirty-eight years old; I think--you sold 40,334; of Tom Sawyer, 41,000.
And so on.
And there is one thing that is peculiarly gratifying to me: the Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc is a serious book; I wrote it for love, and
never expected it to sell, but you have pleasantly disappointed me in
that matter.
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