It was one of history’s most notoriously overdue library books. Sometime in the late 19th century, the first half of Mark Twain’s original handwritten “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” manuscript disappeared from the Buffalo library, where Twain had donated it. It was presumed lost forever…until 24 years ago today, when Sotheby’s auction house in New York announced that it had authenticated a set of papers as the long-lost missing half of “Huck Finn” on February 13, 1991.

The papers took a strange trip on their way back to Buffalo. The manuscript showed up in a trunk in an attic in Los Angeles, of all places. A pair of sisters had gained possession of the trunk on the death of an aunt in upstate New York. The sisters themselves were granddaughters of James F. Gluck, a lawyer and book collector who had been a friend of Twain’s and convinced him to donate the manuscript to the Buffalo library. The accepted theory is that Gluck borrowed half the manuscript from the library, then forgot he had it. He died suddenly in 1897, and the stack of papers, with no title page, was probably hurriedly stuffed in a trunk…where it stayed for nearly 100 years.

“Huck Finn” is known for its pervasive use of dialect – notoriously so in the case of a racial slur whose repeated use, while honest to the time and people the book depicts, has made the novel a thorny presence in school libraries and children’s reading lists. The recovered manuscript shows how Twain wrestled to find the right voice for his unlettered protagonist, who also narrates the novel. In the book’s opening line, Huck tells the reader "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." Twain labored over this introduction, originally writing “You will not know about me,” before changing it to “You do not know about me” and then settling on the final version.

In the end, the Buffalo library appeared ready to overlook Gluck’s oversight. During his life, Gluck had been a prodigious collector, and donator, of books, having donated hundreds of pieces of writing to the library, where he served as curator. It seems he also pestered many a writer to donate their original scribblings. "Gluck badgered everyone into giving," is what William Loos, curator of rare books at the Buffalo library in 1991, said after recovering the “Finn” papers, according to the New York Times. He added "If Gluck forgot to return this overdue book, we are prepared to forgive him."

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