Other Fiction Twain, Mark: Those Extraordinary Twins (Illustrated). v1. 28 Sep 2014

[GrannyGrump]

THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS (Illustrated)
by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910)

First published in 1894.
This book is in the public domain world-wide, because the author died more than 100 years ago.

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Mark Twain, author and humorist, is most noted for the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “the Great American Novel.”

With Those Extraordinary Twins, Twain intended to undertake an exploration into the absurd. The protagonists of this short fantastical farce are conjoined twins with opposite personalities, likes, and dislikes; and often, the actions of one affect his brother rather than himself. For example, Luigi takes a drink or several, with no consequence to himself: instead, Angelo bears the inebriation – and the hangover.

Twain explains in the foreword how this tale evolved into an ungainly dual story, an entanglement of farce and tragedy – so he pulled the farce back out, and completed the tragedy as Pudd’nhead Wilson. The farcical remnant was published as an adjunct to the novel, with notes inserted to summarize text that found its home in Pudd’nhead. The notes are as amusing as the surrounding passages.

It is a fast and rackety ride, with Twain’s dryly witty observations on ludicrous human behavior to speed you on your way.

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Editing notes ---

Text is based on the 1923 “Definitive Edition” from Gabriel Wells publishing, and was proofed and corrected against a pdf scan of that book. I formatted punctuation, diacritics, and italics; added scene breaks; cross-linked chapter heads to html table of contents; embedded fonts for titling and small-caps.

The book includes 193 “marginal illustrations” from the American first edition, which were manually cleaned and enhanced. Unfortunately the source images were very small and pale -- perhaps someday I will find a better source. There were too many tiny illustrations to make a “centered-images” version this time.

The cover was designed and created for this project by MiniMouse, MobileRead forum member. See her Custom Covers thread for more of her lovely work.

Pudd’head Wilson is available here.

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