56. Clemens, Samuel L. Autograph aphorism signed (“Mark Twain”), 1 page (4 x 6 in.; 102 x 152 mm.), no place or date. Fine condition.

Mark Twain and his fictional character, Pudd’nhead Wilson, have no faith in the female sense of punctuality!

Clemens writes in full: Nothing is so ignorant as a man’s left hand, except a lady’s watch. Truly Yours Mark Twain

One of America’s greatest writers, Twain was an inept businessman whose “inherited instinct for speculation” caused his family great financial hardship and misery. Chief among his failures were the dissolution of several publishing ventures and the loss of a $200,000 investment in an unperfected typesetting machine. Though the project was finally abandoned in late 1894, it could not save the fifty-nine-year-old author from declaring bankruptcy. In an effort to pay off his enormous debts, and despite his dislike of public speaking, Twain soon embarked upon a worldwide lecture tour, chronicled in his 1897 book Following the Equator. Each chapter from the book opens with a quotation from “Pudd’nhead Wilson”, the title character in his 1894 work The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. The present quotation is the epigraph for Chapter XXII, a maxim from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar” which communicates the low value Wilson placed on women’s sense of punctuality.
$2,500 - $3,000