dollar per hour of dictation and five cents per hundred words of typescript. She began immediately with a transcription of the morning’s conversation. “We will try this,” Clemens told Paine, “see whether it is dull or interesting, or whether it will bore us and we will want to commit suicide. I hate to get at it. I hate to begin, but I imagine that if you are here to make suggestions from time to time, we can make it go along, instead of having it drag.” He proposed a schedule of four or five days a week, for roughly two hours each morning. 65 Clemens talked while Hobby took him down in shorthand and Paine listened appreciatively. For these early sessions, Paine recalled, Clemens usually dictated from bed, “clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows.” 66
Before Clemens was done dictating in 1909, he and Hobby, along with three other typists, generated more than five thousand pages of typescript. That enormous body of material has, since Clemens’s death, constituted the largest part of the manuscript known as the “Autobiography.” But probably since DeVoto’s time as editor of the Mark Twain Papers, anyone who consulted that file was likely to be puzzled by two things. First, most of the Autobiographical Dictations between January and August 1906 were filed in folders—one per dictation—containing between two and four separate, distinct typed copies of essentially the same text. No one understood the purpose of the duplicates. Second, the differences (if any) between these various “duplicates” were not obvious or readily intelligible: pagination differed, seemingly without pattern; some contained handwritten authorial revisions, while others were unmarked; and many were extensively marked by at least half a dozen different (mostly unidentified) hands, in addition to the author’s. These documents constituted the central puzzle confronting anyone who set out to publish the
Autobiography of Mark Twain
.
The First Typescript (TS1)
A first step in solving the puzzle was to find reliable ways of distinguishing between the several, nearly identical typed copies in any given folder. The paper used, specific characteristics of the typewriter and habits of the typist, and of course the unexplained differences in pagination proved to be essential pieces of evidence. The very first typescript Hobby created from her stenographic notes was eventually isolated and identified in this way, and it is called hereafter TS1 (for typescript 1). Each of the other typescripts (sometimes with carbon copies as well) were similarly identified, and are herein referred to by number (TS2, TS3, and TS4). Once they were physically distinguishable in this way, it became possible to see that the (understandable) fashion in which daily dictations were filed had in fact long obscured why there
were
different typed copies. 67 It was in turn possible to decide, on the basis of meticulous collation,which was copied from which, and to begin to make some sense of the various differences between them.
By 18 January Hobby had settled on a standard format for each session: she recorded the time spent on dictation and a word count at the top left of the first page, with the page number centered, and the date of dictation at the right, usually followed by a summary of the contents. Hobby marked in pencil any errors she had failed to correct on the machine. The typescript then went to Clemens for correction and revision. TS1 would total roughly twenty-six hundred consecutively numbered pages, beginning at page 1 with the dictation of 9 January 1906 and ending with the dictation of 14 July 1908, which Hobby completed shortly before leaving Clemens’s employment. Two later stenographer-typists produced another hundred or so pages of typescript, which did not continue the TS1 pagination sequence. 68
Hobby soon agreed to give up her job with the Century Company in order to work for
Before Clemens was done dictating in 1909, he and Hobby, along with three other typists, generated more than five thousand pages of typescript. That enormous body of material has, since Clemens’s death, constituted the largest part of the manuscript known as the “Autobiography.” But probably since DeVoto’s time as editor of the Mark Twain Papers, anyone who consulted that file was likely to be puzzled by two things. First, most of the Autobiographical Dictations between January and August 1906 were filed in folders—one per dictation—containing between two and four separate, distinct typed copies of essentially the same text. No one understood the purpose of the duplicates. Second, the differences (if any) between these various “duplicates” were not obvious or readily intelligible: pagination differed, seemingly without pattern; some contained handwritten authorial revisions, while others were unmarked; and many were extensively marked by at least half a dozen different (mostly unidentified) hands, in addition to the author’s. These documents constituted the central puzzle confronting anyone who set out to publish the
Autobiography of Mark Twain
.
The First Typescript (TS1)
A first step in solving the puzzle was to find reliable ways of distinguishing between the several, nearly identical typed copies in any given folder. The paper used, specific characteristics of the typewriter and habits of the typist, and of course the unexplained differences in pagination proved to be essential pieces of evidence. The very first typescript Hobby created from her stenographic notes was eventually isolated and identified in this way, and it is called hereafter TS1 (for typescript 1). Each of the other typescripts (sometimes with carbon copies as well) were similarly identified, and are herein referred to by number (TS2, TS3, and TS4). Once they were physically distinguishable in this way, it became possible to see that the (understandable) fashion in which daily dictations were filed had in fact long obscured why there
were
different typed copies. 67 It was in turn possible to decide, on the basis of meticulous collation,which was copied from which, and to begin to make some sense of the various differences between them.
By 18 January Hobby had settled on a standard format for each session: she recorded the time spent on dictation and a word count at the top left of the first page, with the page number centered, and the date of dictation at the right, usually followed by a summary of the contents. Hobby marked in pencil any errors she had failed to correct on the machine. The typescript then went to Clemens for correction and revision. TS1 would total roughly twenty-six hundred consecutively numbered pages, beginning at page 1 with the dictation of 9 January 1906 and ending with the dictation of 14 July 1908, which Hobby completed shortly before leaving Clemens’s employment. Two later stenographer-typists produced another hundred or so pages of typescript, which did not continue the TS1 pagination sequence. 68
Hobby soon agreed to give up her job with the Century Company in order to work for
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