On 10 December 1884, Mark Twain self-published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with his nephew Charles Webster under the Charles Webster & Co. imprint. Twain was already a successful writer and wanted to maximise his profit. The book was written in dialect and broke new ground, away from more literary forms of writing. He was fortunate because the following year the book was ‘excluded’ by Concorde Public Library as being ‘trash, more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people’. Subsequent publicity did nothing to harm sales and he went on to sell over 40,000 copies of the first edition.