Mark Twain's original handwritten manuscript of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' restored

An iconic piece of American literature received some special attention in hopes of preserving it for future generations.

Mark Twain’s original handwritten manuscript of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was painstakingly restored by a team of conservators in the Missouri Secretary of State’s office.

“Mark Twain is part of the history of Missouri, but it's also part of the history of our country,” said Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.

The newly preserved document was unveiled at the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site in Florida, Missouri. The museum contains the two-room cabin in which the author, whose given name was Samuel Clemens, was born.

Published in 1876, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” follows the story of Tom and his friend Huckleberry Finn as they experience childhood growing up in a small town near the Mississippi River. The fictional town of St. Petersburg in the novel is based on Twain’s own childhood hometown of Hannibal.

The sometimes mischievous boys engage in shenanigans, always looking for adventure, which soon finds them after they witness a murder and see the wrong man framed for the crime.

Literary critics have argued that this book, which sold slowly at first, created the image of American childhood in this era. Others see the influence of Twain in later American authors, such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulker, who used regional dialects and informal language accurate to their characters' backgrounds.

Twain’s original manuscript embarked on adventures of its own, including four trips by sea across the Atlantic Ocean. Twain had a distinct reason for sending his original manuscript so far from home.

“So Twain wanted to publish it first in Britain, because at the time, there weren't copyright protections. They would steal all the American books and print them over there and not give the author any money,” said John Dougan, the state archivist for the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office.

Unfortunately, this plan backfired on Twain. After the book was published in Britain, someone published a pirated copy in the United States four months before Twain could do so.

The manuscript was purchased from Frank Ivy Glenn, a Kansas City-based manuscript dealer, at the end of World War II. Glenn obtained the manuscript in 1937 from Twain’s British publishing agent, for the price of $6,250. Adjusted for inflation, that would equal over $133,000 today.

The Missouri Legislature created a shrine to Twain featuring this manuscript and other rare editions of Twain’s novels in the state capitol in 1946. In 1959, all the materials in the shrine were transferred to the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site, which opened in 1960.

After multiple trips across the Atlantic Ocean and years of being on display, prior to discoveries of modern document preservation techniques, the book had sustained some damage. The spine was split, it had suffered some discoloration, dirt and debris had built up in the crevices and a previous caretaker had repaired a page with tape.

“The conservators actually have a phrase — ‘Tape is evil,' " Dougan said. “So we recommend you not use tape on anything that you're trying to preserve.”

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Humidification treatments removed the tape. Japanese tissue paper and wheat starch paste was carefully applied to mend small tears. Pages were resewn into the spine. Fillers were applied to areas of total paper loss, then toned to match the rest of the document.

“In total, they spent about 82 hours working on the conservation for this,” Dougan said. “And a very conservative estimate of about $8,200 worth of work was put into this project.”

One special feature of this manuscript was the use of window mounts, meaning that the original pages that Twain wrote on were pasted into a large scrapbook with both sides visible.

“Most often we’ll get stuff where they've just slapped it down onto a page, and you get whatever side they left facing up. And here, they specifically cut each window for what was going to be mounted there,” said conservator Jennie Phelps.

While the manuscript won’t be on display all the time, due to concerns of additional light damage, park superintendent Rachel Hoemann hopes to see the pages take on new life in digital form for park visitors to peruse.

“What the Secretary of State's Office did is they digitized every single page of the manuscript,” Hoemann said. “So hopefully, sometime we can have an iPad or something, so if someone's interested, they can just scroll through and see every single page.”

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Mark Twain's original handwritten 'Tom Sawyer' manuscript restored