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The Quint Essential Blog

  • Some technical details on the publication of The Innocents Abroad

    Our edition of The Innocents Abroad is a very special edition, and we wanted to share some of what sets it apart from others. In our Introduction, we discussed things like the 1200 footnotes, hundreds of definitions, and 8 appendixes, but there is more that makes this edition special. A lot of special attention went…

  • Introducing The Innocents Abroad

    Quint Books is happy to announce the launch of our new book, a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. The book has over 1200 footnotes, intended on making the book more accessible to new generations of readers. Footnotes cover the people, places, and events mentioned in the book, providing context that contemporary reads…

  • Will the real Miss Langdon please stand up?

    On the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, at the end of the Quaker City’s five month journey with Mark Twain, the ship stopped in Bermuda for a few days. While there, the excursionists published a list of passengers, including those who had already left the trip earlier. At the bottom of the list, the total…

  • El Yuba Dam

    In Chapter 45 of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain writes about traveling from Damascus to Kafr Hawr (which he calls Jonesborough), and then continuing on the following day to Banias. Twain wrote: “We left Jonesborough very early in the morning, and rode forever and forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched deserts and…

  • Different views of the Quaker City Mock Trial

    Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad described the five month journey of dozens of passengers on the Quaker City ship traveling from New York to Europe and the Middle East. While cruising across the Atlantic Ocean out of New York, the Quaker City passengers needed activities to take up the many days it took before they…

  • Who was Blucher in The Innocents Abroad?

    Mark Twain uses a fictional character in The Innocents Abroad to help him tell representative stories based on different passengers on the Quaker City. In his original Alta letters, he used a character named Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown shows up roughly twenty one times in the Alta letters (roughly because it depends how you divide…

  • Quaker City Passenger Lists

    Who traveled with Mark Twain on the Quaker City? While some of his fellow passengers became well-known through their association with Twain, or through their own self-promotion after the cruise, the list of who traveled with Twain is hard to pin down exactly due to inaccuracies in some published lists. There are five published lists…

  • From Janesville to the Holy Land, Letters by Julia Newell

    In other posts we’ve provided links to the letters written to newspapers during the Quaker City voyage by Mark Twain and Moses S. Beach. Another passenger, who wrote 14 letters to her hometown newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, was Julia Newell. Newell does not always identify the excursionists by their real names. For example, she called…

  • Mediterranean Bound, Letters by Moses S. Beach

    As mentioned in other posts, Mark Twain was not the only correspondent writing articles from the Quaker City (see Twain’s articles here). While Twain’s 50+ letters to the Daily Alta California formed the foundation of his book The Innocents Abroad, many other passengers were also writing to newspapers across the United States. The person who…