Library Apparently Will Get Twain Manuscript : Literature: Scholars hail ‘Huckleberry Finn’ discovery, saying it will shed light on the masterpiece.

A long-lost “Huckleberry Finn” manuscript discovered stashed away in a Hollywood attic appears to be destined for the Buffalo, N.Y., public library to which Mark Twain donated it more than a century ago.

Sotheby’s of New York, in announcing the rare find Wednesday, said there are no plans to auction the priceless manuscript, and the Hollywood librarian who made the discovery said she probably will return the handwritten papers to Buffalo.

The move apparently defuses a brewing dispute over the rightful ownership of the manuscript, found in a musty old trunk, where it had been stored for at least 30 years.

The discovery sent excited tremors through the American literary world. Scholars said the manuscript will shed important light on Mark Twain’s thoughts and intentions as he wrote “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” widely considered to be his masterpiece and one of the greatest works of American fiction.

“To find the actual handwritten text is just beyond anyone’s dream,” said noted Twain scholar Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Papers Project at UC Berkeley.

The manuscript is a handwritten copy of the first half of the novel, believed to have been written by Twain, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, between 1876 and 1880. It was found by a Hollywood librarian who is the granddaughter of James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo lawyer who corresponded with Twain in the 1880s and who was a pioneer collector of his and other writings.

The manuscript is actually a stack of 665 pages, white writing paper with faint blue rules filled with Twain’s penmanship. Part is written in black ink and a later part is in purple ink. There are scores of revisions made in Twain’s hand, reflecting his thinking process as he crafted the Mississippi River tale. Entire paragraphs are included that are not in the published book; other differences are as seemingly minor as word and punctuation changes.

For example, Twain rewrote the famous opening line three times:

“You will not know about me, . . .” he starts out. Then, “You do not know about me . . . “ and finally, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book. . . .”

The papers had apparently been headed for an auction in June but questions about their ownership arose this week and dashed plans for a sale.

On Monday, aware of the manuscript’s existence and sensing that it might belong to them, officials of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library prepared to stake their claim. On Tuesday, they learned from a Times reporter that the manuscript had been discovered by a descendant of Gluck. That was the missing link; they became convinced that the manuscript belonged to their library.

“Be advised that our library is the rightful owner of that newly discovered manuscript and our position is that you have no right to sell it,” Roland R. Benzow, chairman of the library’s board of trustees, wrote to the president of Sotheby’s.

The basis of the claim is that Gluck solicited the manuscript from Twain in 1885, saying that it would form part of a collection at the Buffalo library. A letter exists showing that the library confirmed receipt of the manuscript in 1887.

Faced with the Buffalo library’s challenge and the letter, Gluck’s granddaughter decided not to go ahead with the auction. In an interview, she said she probably will return the manuscript to Buffalo because that would have been her grandfather’s wish.

Any financial gain that might have come from the sale is “not as important as making sure things are done right,” said the woman, who has asked that her name not be made public.

Just how the manuscript disappeared from the Buffalo library remains a mystery.

Gluck, a civic leader in Buffalo and major benefactor of the public library, wrote Twain to solicit copies of his original manuscripts for the library’s collection. Twain obliged, sending the second half of the “Huckleberry Finn” copy to Gluck. It has been displayed at the Buffalo library ever since.

At the time, Twain had misplaced the first half of “Huckleberry Finn” and believed that it had been destroyed after being sent to the printers. Two years later, he found the copy and evidently dispatched it to Gluck for the library. A letter shows the library confirming its receipt.

But the document vanished, and has been considered lost, until last fall.

Gluck died at the age of 45 in 1895. There is speculation that he might have borrowed the book to read but that death prevented him from returning it. Grieving relatives might have inadvertently packed it with his belongings.

When Gluck’s descendants moved to California in the 1920s, the trunks came with them. The Hollywood librarian who found the manuscript said she inherited the trunks in 1961 and has kept them in her attic until now.

“We will consider it an overdue book and waive the fines,” said Buffalo’s rare-book curator, William H. Loos.

Twain mementos and literary missives have turned up in California previously. Several of Twain’s letters formed part of the Estelle Doheny Collection, which was eventually auctioned off by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1986, a boxful of Twain letters that appraised at half a million dollars was found in a Los Angeles hobby shop. And Twain’s daughter Clara, who lived in Hollywood, once held a yard sale in which she disposed of hundreds of her father’s books and letters. But none of the documents compare to the “Huck Finn” draft.

The discovery was hailed in literary circles as an enormously significant find, certain to open new worlds of research into one of America’s finest and most important writers.

The importance of having the original manuscript, Twain scholars say, is that it best reflects the author’s true intentions and his thought processes.

Hirst said the manuscript would give scholars insight into the problems Twain had in telling his story and how he resolved them.

“The process has been much debated and not clearly understood,” Hirst said. “This allows you to see what he did to it over a period of several years. . . . That’s the most exciting thing.”

Will future copies of “Huck Finn” reflect any changes? Hirst thinks so. The spelling of many words in dialect--Twain uses dialects to tell virtually the entire story--will probably be restored, as well as punctuation and some wording.

“It is hard to tell what difference that makes to the reader . . . but it made a hell of a lot of difference to Mark Twain,” Hirst said.

Sotheby’s officials said they were convinced of the manuscript’s authenticity. The Gluck granddaughter who found the papers contacted Sotheby’s and described what she had. She faxed copies of the first and final pages to Sotheby’s, where experts immediately recognized the handwriting as that of Twain.

“We are well acquainted with Mark Twain’s hand,” said Jay Dillon, Sotheby’s vice president for books and manuscripts.

Sotheby’s arranged to have the stack of papers handled by a firm that specializes in transporting works of art. The manuscript was packed more gingerly than a porcelain vase, encased in layers of wrapping and placed in a rigid box.

Experts at the auction house said they considered the manuscript authentic “on first sight and first feel.”

“It felt right, the paper was obviously 19th-Century, the ink was reasonable. It just felt right,” Dillon said. “There’s no special gift to this, but if one handles manuscripts years and years and years you know what (an authentic manuscript) is supposed to feel like and look like.”

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was published in 1884. Twain had begun writing it in July, 1876, and continued writing in “fits and starts” for the next seven years.

When he had completed the task, he announced the event in a letter to his publisher:

“I’ve just finished writing a book,” Twain wrote, “& modesty compels me to say it’s a rattling good one, too.”

Wilkinson reported from Los Angeles and Hall from New York.