A rebus-letter sent by Mark Twain to his wife

Mark Twain (1835–1910, née Samuel Clemens) wrote essays on art and doodled in his journals, letters, and manuscripts, sometimes to entertain his children and sometimes for his own amusement. In addition, he used his artwork to secure patents for three inventions, including an “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” (to replace suspenders); a history trivia game; and a self-pasting scrapbook coated with a dried adhesive that only needed to be moistened before use.

Read more: The Visual Art and Design of Famous Writers

Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands

Twain visited Hawaii before he was famous, wrote a bunch of letters from the island, turned them into a lecture series that became very popular, and spent the rest of his life dreaming about returning:

No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf-beat in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore; its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud rack; I can feel the spirit of its wooded solitudes; I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

Kind of wishing I’d read the complete collection of letters. Maybe next time.

Link: Mark Twain’s Hawaii - NYTimes.com

Aloha, bitches!

“I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five.”
—Mark Twain, 1866

Friends: I am off with my wife to the island of Maui for a week. I am completely unplugging from the internet, which I haven’t done in probably half a decade. I might post some Instagram photos (@austinkleon), but I doubt it.

“How pleasant to sit on the beach,
On the beach, on the sand, in the sun,
With ocean galore within reach,
And nothing at all to be done!
No letters to answer,
No bills to be burned,
No work to be shirked,
No cash to be earned.
It is pleasant to sit on the beach
With nothing at all to be done.”
—Odgen Nash, “Pretty Halcyon Days”

As my dad used to say, “If you need me, I’ll call you.”

Note to would-be robbers: my in-laws are staying with our ferocious beast of a dog and my shotgun.

Photo by cboykin717

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins - NYTimes.com

[Marginalia] is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

…Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something polite and respectful people did not do.

Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.”

…Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

I’ll type that again: reading a book should not be a passive exercise but rather a raucous conversation.

As you might imagine, I love marginalia.

Mark Twain’s notes to the printer about weather symbols

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