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veststrap.
The nuisance of keeping a scrap-book is: 1. One never has paste or gum
tragacanth handy; 2. Mucilage won't stick, or stay, 4 weeks; 3. Mucilage
sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable; 4. To daub and paste
3
or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and tiresome. My idea is
this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum
of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag or tongue, and dab on
your scraps like postage stamps.
Lay on the gum in columns of stripes.
Each stripe of gum the length of say 20 ems, small pica, and as broad
as your finger; a blank about as broad as your finger between each 2
stripes--so in wetting the paper you need not wet any more of the gum
than your scrap or scraps will cover--then you may shut up the book and
the leaves won't stick together.
Preserve, also, the envelope of this letter--postmark ought to be good
evidence of the date of this great humanizing and civilizing invention.
I'll put it into Dan Slote's hands and tell him he must send you all
over America, to urge its use upon stationers and booksellers--so
don't buy into a newspaper. The name of this thing is "Mark Twain's
Self-Pasting Scrapbook."
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