After many years of saying I would get to Twain someday...I finally have. Tom Sawyer is a very easy read, and despite being billed as a book for young folks, I found it extremely entertaining…
Published
in the United States by 1876, The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be considered one the great American novels.
It is one of a handful of quintessential literary works that display
classic American character and culture.
I
find it interesting that Mark Twain’s classic was being widely read here in the
States well before there was an American edition published. As it turns out, this book was printed in
Great Britain first. Consequently, it
made its way across the Atlantic and into Canada. Given the lax and foggy nature of copyright
laws at the time, it was very easy for a Canadian publisher to print copies of
the book, without Twain receiving so much as “one thin dime” in royalties.
With
the hottest new book of the era selling on the border to a hungry U.S.
audience, the Canadians went one step further…they started releasing the book
in newsprint. If you lived in the United
States, all you had to do was subscribe to the Canadian publishers book
“newspaper”, and for 20 cents a week, you would receive Tom Sawyer, chapter by chapter, complete with “knock-off” woodcut
illustrations copied from the British first edition….all before the book was printed
in the U.S.
So
much for securing the British copyright to his work before releasing it in the
States. By the time Tom Sawyer saw its first American edition, Mark Twain was out a lot
of dough. Seems he was hit pretty hard,
as he only wrote one book over the next five years…
I
read the first American edition:
If you want to read the Canadian "pirated" first edition, you can find that volume here: