Clemens (Samuel Langhorne) Life on the Mississippi, first English edition, signed presentation inscription from the author, 1883.

Clemens (Samuel Langhorne) Life on the Mississippi, first English edition, signed presentation inscription from the author "Dear Mrs Ross - This book (with the kindest regards of the undersigned) is for you to improve you mind with, if it needs it / Sincerely Yours / The Author / Florence, Dec 7/92. / To Mrs Janet Ross, Poggio Gherardo." to endpaper, frontispiece and numerous illustrations, 32pp. advertisements, endpaper with loss to lower corner and with early photograph of Twain laid down, bookplate of Janet Ross to pastedown with 'Castello Della Brunella, Aullo'ink stamp, original pictorial cloth, spine faded, spine ends and corners a little bumped, spine chipped at head, splitting to lower joint, light soiling to lower cover, 8vo, 1883.

⁂ A signed presentation copy of Twain's memoir of his time as a steamboat pilot. Inscribed copies are rare, especially of this edition.

Janet Ann Ross (1842-1927) was a celebrated author and memoirist. She and her husband settled near Florence in 1867 and became a centre for the literary expatriate community, playing host to a wide range of authors including Henry James, Robert Browning, George Eliot and a young Virginia Woolf. Twain arrived in Europe with his family in 1891, fleeing creditors and a ruinous financial situation in the US. He gravitated towards Florence and the Ross family who arranged for them to live at the nearby Villa Viviani. Janet Ross, clearly an energetic and charitable woman, undertook to set the Twains up with food, wine and servants as wells as arranging for the new house to be cleaned from top to bottom. As Twain commented in a letter from the period: "She is a wonderful woman, and we don't see how or when we should have gotten under way without her." Once settled in, Twain was inclined to drop around to the Ross family unannounced, often in a state of some curiosity or confusion and causing much amusement for the family. On one memorable occasion Twain shaved his head in a bid to improve his Italian (the photo laid down on the endpaper depicts Twain with a closely cropped head of hair), surmising that his long hair (compared to the locals' shaven heads) was somehow preventing the language from becoming lodged in his brain.