(Clemens, Samuel Langhorne)

Sidney Lanier. Shakspere and his Forerunners: Studies in Elizabethan Poetry and its Development from Early English.  New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902

2 volumes, in 8s (9 3/4 x 6 5/8 in.; 248 x 168 mm). Title-pages printed in red and black, frontispieces and numerous plates. Publisher's red cloth gilt, red-coated endpapers, top edges gilt, others uncut; spines faded and a bit frayed at heads and feet,spine of first volume a little flecked with white. Red buckram folding case, black morocco labels.

Nick Karanovich (sale, Sotheby’s New York, 19 June 2003, lot 219)

Association copy, each volume twice inscribed and signed by Clemens to his sister-in-law, Susan Langdon Crane. The front pastedown of the first volume is inscribed "To Susan L. Crane from S. L. Clemens, 1903," while the front flyleaf is signed "To SL.C from SL.C., 1903." In the second volume, the position of the inscriptions is reversed: the front pastedown is signed "To S.L.C. from S.L.C., 1903," and the front flyleaf bears the longer inscription, "To Susan L. Crane from SL. Clemens, Quarry Farm, Sept. 1903." To each of the fuller dedications Crane has added her own later inscription, "To Olivia Langdon Loomis, September 6, 1922."

Quarry Farm was the Elmira, New York, home of Livy Clemens's sister Susan and her husband, Theodore W. Crane. The three Clemens daughters were all born at Quarry Farm, and the family spent virtually every summer there from 1870 until Theodore Crane's death in 1889. Sam and Livy returned twice after that, and the inscriptions in this set of books date from their last summer at Quarry Farm. The Cranes built a special octagonal study at Elmira for Clemens in 1874, which became his most productive workplace: large portions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were written there.

Lanier's Shakspere and his Forerunners was not recorded in Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, but it will be included in Prof. Gribben's forthcoming expanded second edition. Clemens had an abiding appreciation for the works of Shakepseare (or the works attributed to Shakespeare, as he would have thought of them), and he presumably consulted Lanier while researching his own Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909). Gribben notes that his "expanded catalog will show that Clemens and his family owned (or at least borrowed and annotated) six separate sets of Shakespeare's works. Moreover, Twain's familiarity with and quotation from the individual plays occupy so many pages that this author constitutes the lengthiest and most complex section of my forthcoming catalog.  Twain simply (and ironically) could not believe that such a gifted writer could possibly emerge with relatively little education from a tiny village like Stratford."