[Book Collecting] The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain from The Limited Editions Club
When I got interested in books for collectors, I discovered during my road trip in the United States a publishing house founded in the 1930s in the US: The Limited Editions Club. I treated myself to 3 books by this publisher. “The Innocents Abroad” is one of them because I found the illustrations exceptional.
Each book came with a “Monthly Letter” from the publisher, telling the story of the book and how it was designed by The Limited Editions Club. Here is a French translation of that letter, along with the book’s 60+ illustrations, for those who aren’t lucky enough to own a copy. The illustrations are numerous, and on top of that, colors were added by stencil, a costly process that is no longer used. Even in France, illustrated books with stencil colors like this date from the 1960s.
As for the content, it’s an extraordinary travel journal. We follow Mark Twain as he sets off on a tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, a cruise ship that carefully selects its passengers. Having been on three cruises myself, I love learning more about cruises from the time of the Paris World’s Fair. I know the book has been translated under the title “Le voyage des innocents” and you can still buy it on secondhand book sites. I highly recommend it!
Here is the translation of the text written by the publisher in French:
A Pleasure Trip
ONE OF THE FINEST, most fruitful, and longest friendships in the history of all literature, whether foreign or domestic, is that of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. Their correspondence was published in 1960 in two large volumes printed by Harvard University Press. This friendship was born out of a book review, and since the book in question is the one selected this month by the Limited Editions Club, we thought it would be fitting to quote liberally from the review (which, as far as we can determine, has never been included in Howells’s complete essays). The review, which was unsigned, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1869. Although the book’s title page clearly states that the author is “Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)”, the reviewer Howells managed to make two mistakes in one sentence by simply copying the name. But his heart was in the right place. Here is the gist of what he had to say:
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress. An account of the excursion voyage of the steamship Quaker City to Europe and the Holy Land, with descriptions of countries, nations, incidents, and adventures as they appeared to the author; with two hundred and thirty-four illustrations. By MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL S. CLEMENTS). [Published by subscription only.] Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co. [The review by W. D. H. continues:]
The character of American humor, and its lack of resemblance to the humor of Kamchatka and Patagonia—will the reader forgive us if we refrain here from committing to paper the reflections suggested by these fresh and relevant subjects? We hope he will recognize our self-denial, proportionate to the magnitude of Mr. Clements’s very funny book, if we give up explaining why it is so funny, or—what amounts to the same thing—why we don’t know. This restraint will leave us very little to say in terms of analysis; indeed, there is very little to say about “The Innocents Abroad” that is not most obvious and easy to describe. The idea of a cargo of Americans on a long cruise to Europe and the Holy Land is in itself almost sufficiently amusing, and it is perhaps praise enough for the author to say that the subject suffers nothing from his treatment. If one considers the humor involved in producing a volume of six hundred pages on this subject, in accordance with one of the main conditions for the success of a subscription book, namely its size, one already gets a good share of humor, without having to pester Mr. Clements further. It is from the generosity and abundance of his own nature that he derives so much amusement in the execution as in the conception of his work. And the humor he dispenses to his reader is always of a good sort; even in its impertinence, it is charming; we do not recall a passage where he attacks the weaker or defenseless, or a moment when he is insolent, despite all his boldness and irreverence. The standard false pretenses of travel that everyone exposes perhaps suffer more than they should, but not as much as they might. It is also impossible that the quality of humor should not sometimes be a bit forced over such a long narrative; but the most astonishing thing is that it is so rarely forced.
Mr. Clements gets a lot of his amusement from his fellow travelers, whom he makes us know quite well, whether he presents them in slightly caricatured form or with care and exactness.
Of course, the instructive parts of Mr. Clements’ book are more general than particular, and the reader gains very little knowledge about the population of cities or the nature of rocks in different places. However, anyone who can be honest enough to see the reality of human life everywhere, or who has only seen Americans as they are abroad, has not traveled in vain and is far from being a useless guide. The young American who told the English officers that two of our gunboats could come and reduce Gibraltar to rubble in the Mediterranean Sea; the American who, in a French restaurant, ‘talked very loudly and rudely, and laughed boisterously, while all the others were so quiet and well-behaved,’ and who ordered ‘wine, sir!’, adding, to provoke admiration in a country where wine is as common as soup, ‘I never dine without wine, sir’; the American who had to be called Gordon several times, being so used to hearing the name pronounced Gordong, and who had forgotten most English words after a three-month stay in Paris; the Americans who ruthlessly covered a three-day journey in Palestine in two days, cruelly overworking the poor beasts they rode, and exhausting the strength of their companions, so as not to break the Sabbath; the American pilgrims who traveled halfway around the world to take a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, and who missed their only opportunity because they demanded the boatman take them for a napoleon when he wanted two — these are all Americans depicted with some advantage by Mr. Clements, and will be easily recognized by those who have had the chance to meet them abroad.
Most parts of the book are written in a style that closely approaches familiar conversation. When Mr. Clements writes about his experiences, we imagine he would talk about them in the same way; and it would be very amusing conversation: often not at all refined in form or substance, but full of touches of humor, which, if not delicate, are almost always easy, with a foundation of excellent common sense and good feelings. There is in this book a quantity of pure human nature that rarely enters literature; the depths of our poor unregenerate humanity, uncertain even of the bliss of happiness, are sounded with a confession as simple as the one Mr. Clements makes in telling of his visit to the Emperor of Russia. Almost any subject, and any event in the author’s past life, seems pertinent to him for the narrative of his journey to Europe and the East, and if the reader finds it impertinent, he no less finds it amusing. The effect depends so much on this continuous incoherence that illustrating a passage cannot do justice to the spirit of the whole, and the passage itself loses half its flavor when separated from the context.
Under his pseudonym of Mark Twain, Mr. Clements is well known in the very wide world of newspaper readers; and this book should secure for him something better than the uncertain status of a popular favorite. It is not our place to fix his rank among the humorists that California has given us, but we think he is, in a completely different way from the others, quite worthy of the company of the best.
That’s enough of an old judgment on The Innocents Abroad. Now let’s talk about a more recent judgment — perhaps the most recent. An Italian edition of our book has been published in Milan under the title Gli Innocenti all’Estero, and this edition is reviewed by Mario Materassi in the December 1961 issue of Atlas: The Magazine of the World Press, edited by Quincy Howe and designed by our good friend George Salter, to whom we owe our attention to this review. (George Salter also designed our edition of The Innocents Abroad, and we will have more to say about him in a moment.) Mr. Materassi writes, in a commentary that is about as long as William Dean Howells’ ninety-two years earlier:
“Much has been written about Mark Twain’s attitude toward Europe, that iconoclastic attitude of the American who refuses to accept the European way of seeing history and traditions of the Old World, that attitude whose historical perspective rests on the present and which continually uses the present as its only touchstone.
We cannot help but note that the words he used to describe (‘mark’ would be a more appropriate term) Europe a century ago are still relevant to today’s Europe. The feeling of decadence, of pretentious and empty inaction that we now find in Europe is what Mark Twain observed on the continent he visited — a decaying Europe, an operetta Europe, with its cuirassiers and its little princes in their ornate uniforms.”
Mark Twain truly traveled against the current during his excursion, for it was always oriented toward return: “Whenever we returned from a shore excursion, our eyes first sought one thing in the distance: the ship — and when we saw it at anchor, its flag hoisted high, we felt like a traveler coming home when he sees his house. As soon as we set foot on board, our cares vanished and our troubles ended, for the ship was a true home to us.” And though that other stream of travelers, or rather discoverers of their own origins (one need only recall the names of Cooper and Washington Irving, Hawthorne and James, not to mention the colonies of artists flourishing in Rome and Florence), found the adventure of a lifetime in a single trip to Europe, Mark Twain’s “innocents” enjoyed their excursion precisely because they knew America was waiting for them at the end of the road. The Old World did not tempt them. As Lowell wrote to Henry James in 1878, “They have never questioned whether their own country is the best in the world or not, because they knew it was.”
Strictly speaking, California did not give us Mark Twain—Missouri did. He was born there, in the hamlet of Florida, on November 30, 1835, as Halley’s Comet streaked across the sky. When Sam was five, the family moved to Hannibal, in the same state, and if you know Tom Sawyer , and Huckleberry Finn, you already know everything about Hannibal. Clemens’s father, a sort of lawyer, died in 1847 when Sam was twelve, and Sam’s formal education came to an end. He joined his brother Orion, who ran a weekly newspaper, and learned the printing trade. In 1853, he considered himself skilled enough to try his luck out East, and he took New York and Philadelphia by storm, but decided it would be better to join Orion, who was now publishing a paper in Keokuk, Iowa. Sam and Orion did not get along very well, and in 1857, Sam became a pilot’s apprentice on the Mississippi River, which flowed near Keokuk. In doing so, in due time, he made a name for himself (or rather borrowed a name from pilot slang).
Orion had somehow managed to get himself appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Sam, forgetting their past differences, became his secretary. He did not stay a secretary for long; he became a journalist, and it was in 1862, while working for the Virginia City Enterprise, that he first signed his articles with the name Mark Twain. In 1864, he left for San Francisco and worked for three local newspapers.
He also wrote The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and became a modest celebrity himself. He went to the Hawaiian Islands (then called the Sandwich Islands) for the Sacramento Bee. That trip produced excellent travel letters and made Mark a public lecturer. Then the Alta California of San Francisco commissioned him to go around the world. But when he arrived in New York, he heard about the excursion of the Quaker City to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land, and he chose instead to join that voyage.
Thus was born our book, The Innocents Abroad.
Another passenger aboard the Quaker City was a young man named Langdon, who had a sister named Olivia and had brought along a miniature portrait of her on the voyage. After returning to the United States, Mark went up to Elmira, New York, and met the original of the portrait, then married her.
Then followed many other books, with fame, fortune, and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University (much of his fortune was invested in promoting bizarre inventions—those of others, needless to say). Late in life, Mark settled into a beautiful house in Redding, Connecticut, designed for him by John Mead Howells, the son of William Dean Howells, and it was there, on April 21, 1910, that he died, as Halley’s Comet again streaked across the sky on its first reappearance since 1835.
The preparation of the text for our sumptuous edition of The Innocents Abroad raised a few small editorial problems. The original edition was rife with typographical errors, some of which have been corrected over the years, and others not. On top of that, Mark Twain himself had made some unconscious errors, particularly in his choice of words. And above all, he had certainly made deliberate errors. Here is what we did: we corrected the obvious typographical errors. We also corrected the author’s clear factual errors (thus, Mark Twain called Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo “Shepherd,” a natural and evident mistake). But as for word choice, we let Mark have his way, even when he was plainly wrong. For example, in the last sentence of Chapter VIII, he uses “flout” when he clearly meant “flaunt.” There is no chance that was a typographical error. So we left “flout” as is. In the second paragraph of Chapter XXXIII, Mark mentions the “poverty, misery, and” mendacity of the Greek population. “Mendacity” is a perfectly valid word, meaning a tendency to lie, but it has little relevance in association with poverty and misery (unless one wants to argue that hunger breeds lying, which may indeed be true). A more logical choice would be “mendicity,” the practice of begging, which is a moderately rare synonym for “mendicancy.” We left “mendacity” as is, while warning the reader that it might be an error. The deliberate errors largely concern quotations in foreign languages, especially French. “Ici on parle française “, Mark writes!, meaning “Ici on parle français “. “Chef d’œuvres,” he writes, meaning “Chefs-d’œuvre.” These and similar errors we left intact, including the engraved identification “JULIE DI DIOMEDE” on a necklace encircling a skeletal throat at Pompeii, which is passable Italian but very poor Latin.
Edward Wagenknecht, who wrote the introduction to our edition of The Innocents Abroad, has been a professor of English at Boston University since 1947. A native of Chicago, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago in 1923 and 1924, and his doctorate from the University of Washington in 1932. His books, largely biographical and critical, include Charles Dickens: His Life and Work, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work, Cavalcade of the American Novel, A Preface to Literature, Longfellow: A Full-Length Portrait, and The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt. He has a book on Washington Irving coming out this spring under the imprint of Oxford University Press, and next fall, the University of Oklahoma Press will publish The Movies in the Age of Innocence. He is also working on a book about Poe for Oxford.
Fritz Kredel has been illustrating Limited Editions Club books since 1931, when he was half his current age. The Innocents Abroad is his fifteenth work for us; in other words, this club has published a book embellished by Kredel every two years for a generation. We have summarized Fritz Kredel’s career fourteen times in these Monthly Letters over that generation; so we will refrain from doing so again for now. We will simply say that Fritz Kredel’s line is growing stronger and his inimitable style is becoming more and more inimitable as the years pass — every Kredel book you receive is the best he has ever done. We would like to point out that one of the books illustrated by Fritz Kredel for us was Slovenly Peter, translated by none other than Mark Twain. The author, Heinrich Hoffmann, had also been the original illustrator, and Fritz Kredel adapted Hoffmann’s drawings for the book, which is a Mark Twain first edition.
For our edition of The Innocents Abroad, Fritz Kredel created an impressive total of sixty-one illustrations, and these drawings were hand-colored in the Walter Fischer studios in New York by Frank Hudec — hand-colored with stencils in palettes ranging from four to nine colors, based on Fritz Kredel’s originals. They are scattered throughout the text in an almost random fashion; the effect is that of a medley of postcards, which seems particularly fitting for a travel book.
George Salter has designed six books for us, and three of the six (The Singular Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Poems of Heinrich Heine and this present edition of The Innocents Abroad) have been illustrated by Fritz Kredel — a combination of talents as fortunate as you are ever likely to see.
The typeface chosen by George Salter is Monotype Bell in 11 point, which was designed in the late eighteenth century by John Bell (no relation to John Peel, although bells do ring, right?). Our version of this typeface is a revision cut in the early 1930s.
The printers of the illustrations and the text are the Thistle Press of New York. They printed the Bell type on a vellum paper from Curtis made especially for this book, according to our always exacting specifications, by the Curtis Paper Company of Newark, Delaware.
Under the supervision of the exacting Frank D. Fortney, the binders Russell-Rutter have covered the boards according to George Salter’s elegant specifications: on the sides, a paper on which a striking peacock-tail effect has been hand-marbled by Douglas Cockerell & Son in Letchworth, Hertfordshire; around the spine, a handsome red linen cloth, bearing a leather label for the title, and decorated with vignettes by Fritz Kredel, all stamped in pure gold leaf.
