Sketches of the Sixties: Being Forgotten Material Now Collected for the First time from The Californian 1864-67.

HARTE, Bret and Mark Twain. [Samuel L. Clemens].

$375.00

Item Number: 127607

San Francisco: John Howell, 1927.

Second edition of the compiled uncollected materials of Twain and Harte from The Californian. Octavo, bound in three quarter morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raise gilt bands, pictorial endpapers, gilt topstain, frontispiece of page one of the first number of The Californian, illustrated. From the library of William Safire with his bookplate to the pastedown. William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and supported him again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. In very good condition.

The Californian was started in May 1864 by publishers P.J. Thomas, A.A. Stickney and John Collner. Charles Henry "Inigo" Webb was the first editor, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow was one of the first contributors. Bret Harte was an editor, and Mark Twain was hired at a salary of $50 per month. Harte contributed articles as well, and the periodical jumped to the fore among its competitors in the San Francisco Bay Area including the Golden Era. The paper was published in the "imperial size", an industry term. It measured 22 inches across and thirty inches high with easy to read pages that ran three columns across. According to Ben Tarnoff, "Readers expecting tales of honest miners, or lyrical tributes to California's landscape, would be disappointed. Like Harte himself, the Californian took pleasure in puncturing cliches. It could be populist or aristocratic, radical or conservative--but always contrarian."