Seeing Double

“Before Norman Rockwell came to Hannibal, he produced preliminary illustrations from his reading of the books. Only one of these early preliminaries exists, the one of Tom sneaking out at night hanging by the stairway. Rockwell gave the final preliminaries for Tom Sawyer to the New Rochelle Public Library. They made lithographs of them, and we have a signed set of lithographs in the darker frames. We believe the other early preliminaries for Tom Sawyer and all the preliminaries for Huckleberry Finn were destroyed in a Rockwell studio fire.”