I believe you keep a lawyer.  I have always kept a lawyer, too, though I have never made anything out of him.  It is service to an author to have a lawyer.  There is something so disagreeable in having a personal contact with a publisher.  So it is better to work through a lawyer—­and lose your case.  I understand that the publishers have been meeting together also like us.  I don’t know what for, but possibly they are devising new and mysterious ways for remunerating authors.  I only wish now to thank you for electing me a member of this club—­I believe I have paid my dues—­and to thank you again for the pleasant things you have said of me.

Last February, when Rudyard Kipling was ill in America, the sympathy which was poured out to him was genuine and sincere, and I believe that which cost Kipling so much will bring England and America closer together.  I have been proud and pleased to see this growing affection and respect between the two countries.  I hope it will continue to grow, and, please God, it will continue to grow.  I trust we authors will leave to posterity, if we have nothing else to leave, a friendship between England and America that will count for much.  I will now confess that I have been engaged for the past eight days in compiling a publication.  I have brought it here to lay at your feet.  I do not ask your indulgence in presenting it, but for your applause.

Here it is:  “Since England and America may be joined together in Kipling, may they not be severed in ‘Twain.’”

BOOKSELLERS

Address at banquet on Wednesday evening, May 20, 1908, of the American Booksellers’ Association, which included most of the leading booksellers of America, held at the rooms of the Aldine Association, New York.

This annual gathering of booksellers from all over America comes together ostensibly to eat and drink, but really to discuss, business; therefore I am required to, talk shop.  I am required to furnish a statement of the indebtedness under which I lie to you gentlemen for your help in enabling me to earn my living.  For something over forty years I have acquired my bread by print, beginning with The Innocents Abroad, followed at intervals of a year or so by Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Gilded Age, and so on.  For thirty-six years my books were sold by subscription.  You are not interested in those years, but only in the four which have since followed.  The books passed into the hands of my present publishers at the beginning of 1900, and you then became the providers of my diet.  I think I may say, without flattering you, that you have done exceedingly well by me.  Exceedingly well is not too strong a phrase, since the official statistics show that in four years you have sold twice as many volumes of my venerable books as my contract with my publishers bound you and them to sell in five years.  To your sorrow you are aware that frequently, much too frequently, when a book gets to be five or ten years old its annual sale shrinks to two or three hundred copies, and after an added ten or twenty years ceases to sell.  But you sell thousands of my moss-backed old books every year—­the youngest of them being books that range from fifteen to twenty-seven years old, and the oldest reaching back to thirty-five and forty.