GUEST: This is a letter written to my great-grandfather, and he was the childhood friend and grew up with Sam Clemens, the author that's known as Mark Twain.
APPRAISER: Mark Twain, exactly.
GUEST: So they corresponded, and this is one of the letters.
APPRAISER: He's writing from Hawaii, May 7, 1866.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: He was a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. I think he stayed about four months in Hawaii, which a lot of people don't know, but it was the Sandwich Islands he referred to.
GUEST: The Sandwich Islands.
APPRAISER: And the content of the letter is fabulous. He's talking about his experiences there, his travels there. He was writing about the topical events and things that were going on. He talks about a volcano. He also gives some anecdotal stuff about a greased pig and a crazy comic scene in there, which I think is picked up later in some of his works. This stuff became really kind of part of the fabric of what he was drawing on later on in life in his books. They were childhood friends, right?
GUEST: They go back. Yes, they grew up in Hannibal together, yes.
APPRAISER: And they even were steamboat pilots together.
GUEST: Yes, they were.
APPRAISER: He was a lifelong friend, I mean, so much so that you brought along here an exhibition that was held here in Austin in 1941 at the University of Texas dealing with their friendship and the letters between the two of them, and it's called "My First & Oldest & Dearest Friend." So when we think about association value in a letter, the more meaningful the association, generally the more valuable the letter. This is a great one. It's early, it's 1866. He was 31 at the time, hadn't really begun his writing career. He was a journalist, but he wasn't really writing any of his novels. And it was interesting looking into your great-grandfather. Will Bowen, he's thought to be the model, or one of the models, for Tom Sawyer.
GUEST: He is.
APPRAISER: So he was a bit of a rascal, I guess, right?
GUEST: Yeah, there's accounts of them all running kind of crazy in the neighborhood.
APPRAISER: It's a fantastic letter. The content I said is great, it's four pages. The reason I didn't take them out of the housing you have them in is because of the fragile nature of the paper, and I just didn't want anything to happen to them until you get them conserved, which I'm going to recommend strongly that you do.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: How did you come to get the letter, by the way? You found the letter?
GUEST: I found the letter in my parents' house. Unfortunately, it was after my father had passed away and some of his friends had come to, you know, do the big toast and what have you, and somebody needed a coaster out of the drawer, and there it was in the drawer.
APPRAISER: As to the value, Twain letters range greatly, and it has to do with the content and who they're to. This is something nice because it goes back to his childhood and it hooks in with his whole background in Hannibal and steamboats, so I would go on the stronger side on this and I would put an auction estimate of $8,000 to $12,000.
GUEST: Wow, okay.
APPRAISER: I hope you like that.
GUEST: Yeah!
APPRAISER: For insurance value, which I'm sure you're going to keep this, you'd want to be about $15,000, something like that. Usually about double the low estimate on that.
GUEST: Yeah.
