To Bob Hirst: Not a § of Our Land Could Show His ||

Although he generally deplored the literary use of puns, in his leisure hours Mark Twain enjoyed other varieties of wordplay where words were represented by visual signs—whether gestures, as in charades, or drawings, in rebuses. One rebus letter, written “for the children,” survives in a facsimile printed by Albert Bigelow Paine. (Figure 1.)The document files of the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley contain a couple of other examples of Clemens’ enjoyment of visual puns—a mildly obscene rebus scrawled on an envelope, and a set of charades and rebuses (again somewhat racy) on the verso of a program from the SS Minnetonka on his return from London in 1907. Many years later, in his “Key to Signs” in his Pudd'nhead Wilson, he presented “a simple system of weather signs” for use at the head of each chapter, to obviate the need for the unnecessarily tedious descriptions of the weather that were common among his contemporaries.Such fragments, peppered through the archives, attest to Clemens’ ongoing fascination with the expressive possibilities of language when liberated from the strictures of straightforward prose. For Twain, these riddling amusements were not mere diversions but a means of inviting others—young and old alike—into a shared game of intellect and imagination. They served as coded gestures of camaraderie, and, in their playful ambiguity, sometimes veiled the subversive humor that marked so much of his published work. In an era when print was king and the rules of typesetting defined the look of the written word, Twain's attentiveness to the visual and material qualities of language seems both fitting and forward-looking.The delight Clemens took in these playful exchanges reveals a lighter side to the author often overshadowed by his public persona. Visual and typographical humor seemed to offer him a respite from the rigors of composition; they connected him to both children and fellow writers through wit that transcended conventional language. These artifacts—tucked into envelopes or scribbled on programs—stand as small monuments to a joy in cleverness and camaraderie, a spirit echoed in the traditions of print culture both before and after his time.Clemens’ ease with and enjoyment of symbols may derive from his days as a shorthand reporter, or perhaps from his experiences as a compositor, standing at a case full of type that included symbolic replacements for common words, e.g. “&” for “and” as well as symbolic formatting signs, e.g. braces and spaces of various lengths.I was part of a small cohort of a new generation of editors at MTP hired in the mid-2000s, who were charged with bringing the editions of the Mark Twain Project online. The word on the street, in digital humanities circles, was that digital publication would soon surpass print publication in efficiencies and power—a claim that remains to be fulfilled. Bob welcomed us “gear-heads” into the editorial fold, not as outliers but as editors—it started with patient explanations of why such-and-such a formatting detail which we were struggling to translate into XML/HTML was necessary to correctly present Mark Twain's work, and ended with many a master class on nineteenth-century print culture and every aspect of Clemens’ working habits. Bob was never too busy to share his vast fount of knowledge in his inimitable way. My biggest regret when I retired from the Project was that I hadn't somehow recorded everything he had told me or at least taken notes.Three years before Samuel Langhorne Clemens first saw the light of day, a newspaper in rural Virginia printed a rebus poem of an innovative cast, no doubt composed by a “type-sticker,” over the pseudonym Brevier, using typographical symbols in the place of images, which appears above. The Boston Investigator offers the earliest known reprinting, complete with a key for the uninitiated. It's a “goak” worthy of Mark Twain, and my tribute to Bob Hirst, from whom I learned so much more about Mark Twain and nineteenth-century print culture than I could ever express in a short note. A double health to you, Bob!