Finding a book that doesn’t exist

Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, refers to a book twice in the text. In Chapter 48, he quotes from book saying:

“C.W.E.,” (of “Life in the Holy Land”), deposes as follows:

and then quotes a passage from the book. In Chapter 56, he again quotes a passage from the book, introducing it as:

A writer in “Life in the Holy Land” observes:

So who is C.W.E. and what book is Life in the Holy Land?

If you search for the book on Amazon, a listing actually pops up:

The book looks to be from the right period to be quoted in Twain’s 1869 book, but the book isn’t available, and no author is listed. So we know the book exists. So it should be easy enough to find, even if it’s not currently available on Amazon, right? Not exactly.

Sites that are useful for finding these kinds of books include Archive.org and Google Books, but both of them struck out. A site that’s useful for searching for books for sale online is BookFinder.com, and it came up with an interesting set of results:

There’s a book dated 1869 called Life in the Holy Land. That might seem odd, as Twain’s journey took place in 1867, and it would be somewhat odd to quote from a book that hadn’t come out when he was on the journey, but it isn’t impossible (since Twain’s book was also published in 1869). That listing shows:

Take a close look. Even though the search results said author unknown, the book’s listing itself shows the author as Charles W. Elliot! It looks like we may have found our book, but it’s still odd that we haven’t come across this before. Why isn’t it in Archive.org or Google Books? With the author’s name we can try those searches again. Archive.org again strikes out, but Google Books shows:

Searching for just Charles W. Elliot didn’t give great results, but adding ‘holy land’ brought this book up in the first result. It says it’s a re-release of the original 1867 edition, so that makes it even more likely to be something Twain would have referenced. Note the name, however, is Remarkable Characters and Places of the Holy Land. That’s not Life in the Holy Land, but it gives us a new search vector.

Searching for “Remarkable Characters and Places of the Holy Land” on Google Books indeed finds a book, published first in 1867, by Charles Wyllys Elliot:

Here’s the title page of that book:

Notice that the publisher is the same as the Life in the Holy Land result on Amazon. But how can they be the same book? Let’s try a search on eBay:

There are several copies of the book shown. Note the last one. The front cover reads ‘Life in the Holy Land’. Indeed all of them read Life in the Holy Land on the front cover, but have the full correct title on the spine and the title page. Whether Twain made a mistake or did it intentionally is unknown, but if it was a mistake, it was the same mistake that the people who listed it on Amazon made, as well as the listing on BookFinder.

One short-cut we could have made is to note that the listing on BookFinder is actually from eBay. If we had searched eBay for Life in the Holy Land, it actually shows two results with the book, and one of them shows the title page (even though it doesn’t list the correct name).