When Langdon Clemens was born here, in 1870, his father sent letters with a drawing of the baby wearing an overcoat – a birth announcement dressed as a Buffalo joke.
Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, liked to draw. But he also liked to have illustrations by others for the things he wrote. As it happens, these included drawings for some of his stories in the Buffalo Express when he was its editor and part owner more than 150 years ago.
Thomas J. Reigstad is our foremost local scholar of our foremost former citizen. He gave us “Scribblin’ for a Livin’: Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo,” his 2013 book about the 20 months that Twain spent here. And now Reigstad offers a handsomely illustrated companion book called “The Illustrated Mark Twain and The Buffalo Express: 10 Stories and Over a Century of Sketches,” which comes out next week. (You can order it early here.)
The 10 stories are Twain’s. The illustrations are by five artists with Western New York connections (including Twain himself) plus one by Ohio’s Bill Watterson, the creator of “Calvin and Hobbes.” Two years before his comic strip hit it big, Watterson did freelance cartoons for the “Mark Twain Journal” – and one of those was for “Curious Dream,” among the Twain stories reprinted in the new book. (Calvin, of course, is a Huck Finn for our time.)
As for those with WNY connections: John Harrison Mills worked as an illustrator at The Buffalo Express, and True Williams illustrated the first edition of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” (Mills, of…
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