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For any copyright, please send me a message. Mark Twain: author, luminary . . . vandal? Well, sort of. Experts say they’ve discovered a signature from the famous scribe — whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens — inside a cave in Hannibal, Missouri. It’s not just any cave, either: Twain, who lived in Hannibal as a child and young adult, used the six-mile-long cavern as an important setting in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It’s long been a site of fascination for literature and history buffs: For over a century, some 250,000 tourists — including American outlaw Jesse James and artist Norman Rockwell — inscribed their own names onto the cave’s walls. That stopped in 1972, when the site was registered as a national natural landmark and vandalism was outlawed there. But the author’s own signature had never been found there — until now. “We have been looking for a Clemens signature for decades,” said Linda Coleberd, whose family has owned the Mark Twain Cave since 1923, on the landmark’s website. Coleberd and her friend Cindy Lovell, a flight educator from New Smyrna Beach, Fla. and self-proclaimed “Twainiac,” had spent 20 years searching the cave for Twain’s signature. They finally discovered it during a tour in July — but waited to announce the news until scholars examined it. Although Twain never mentioned signing the cave walls in any of his writings, literary scholars believe the signature is authentic. “I am going to go on record as believing this to be Sam Clemens’s handwriting,” said Dr. Alan Gribben, a professor at Auburn University-Montgomery who has studied Twain for half a century. “We know he was often there and that it was an important landmark to him.” Austin, TX-based rare books dealer Kevin MacDonnell, the owner of the world’s largest private collection of Twin first edition books, letters, photos and sundry artifacts, also scrutinized the handwriting, cross-referencing it with his own materials. “The signature in the cave shares all of these traits with [Twain’s] Oct. 1853 signature,” he said. Since the signature only consists of Twain’s real last name, Clemens, it be one of his siblings’ autographs instead — but experts thinks that’s unlikely. Twain, Gribben said, is “far more egotistically assertive” than his siblings, Orion and Henry, and likely more “inclined” to immortalize himself this way. Plus, higher resolution photos of the signature revealed that Twain’s real first name, Sam, had first been carved into the wall ahead of Clemens. Coleberd and Lovell are thrilled to see two decades of dimly-lit walks rewarded. “My single hope has been that someone would find it during my lifetime,” said Lovell.
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