The Illustrations, Museum, and Museum Illustrations of Mark Twain

Jan 22, 2026

Yesterday I published the visual novel for Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson:

The book is of course entertaining and funny — that goes without saying for Twain — but in addition, it also has cool first-edition illustrations.

For my initial reading, I had to stick with the boring, pictureless Standard Ebooks copy of the novel, but once I started on the actual VN-editing process, I incorporated many of the original illustrations into the visual novel. All as part of marking sure that you, dear reader, will never need to suffer the pictureless reading experience.

But really, Twain's novels are already a treasure trove for fun drawings, with one novel in particular holding a special place for this site. You see, my profile picture on Github is this guy:

Which comes from Twain's funniest novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:

(For higher quality images of the drawings, see Project Gutenberg's scan of the book.)

The relevance to the website is that it's specifically the illustrations from Connecticut Yankee that I use as the reference art for the VN image generations. As of writing, it's these two drawings in particular:

These are the character sprite reference and background picture reference that I include when making the AI drawing requests. It's these two images (combined with some long boilerplate prompting) that the whole website's art style derives from. The Mark Twain public domain style.

So Twain's contributions to the site are no great exaggeration. Which is why last month, I was happy to have the chance to stop over at the Mark Twain museum in Hannibal, Missouri:

There I saw, among other things, Twain's appropriately grand bust:

And of course plenty of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn displays; and to a lesser extent, books like Prince and the Pauper and Joan of Arc too. But it was Connecticut Yankee I was most after.

Unfortunately for me, capricious Fortuna decided to rope off that one section in particular:

But she didn't get the last laugh. For deeper into the museum, far back in a hall on the upper floor, back behind a display of Normal Rockwell illustrations (who knew he did Twain art too!), back where the lights flickered and hardly a fellow tourist could be found; back there is where I found the real gem of the museum: the 137-year-old original original illustrations for Connecticut Yankee!

And so now you see, that when the visual novel revolution inevitably supplants all other forms of entertainment, it will be from standing on the shoulders of Mark Twain and this little glass display of his.

(Uh, and the illustrator I suppose.)