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Custodial care of the literary remains of Mark Twain resides mostly at the Bancroft Library in Berkley, Calif. Though he joked before his career was well begun that he wanted no such “remains” published, Twain left at his death in 1910 a vast and unruly assemblage of them, which dwarfed the posthumous product of any other American author of the 19th century: some half-million pages, including a huge autobiography, thousands of letters, notebooks and personal financial documents, Robert Hirst writes in this nearly-a-century-on collection of Twainiana (which I, as an MT devotee, must have).

• Who Is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain Himself, Harper Studio, 208 pages, $25.99

So, a self-preservationist, indeed, and one fearless of posterity's verdict.

Posthumous Twainiana has appeared at regular intervals, from the truncated version of the Autobiography published by MT's biographer and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine to a number of sketches published by Paine's successor, Bernard de Voto, as the angrily iconoclastic, and unfinished, Letters from the Earth, and the bawdy Elizabethan pastiche, 1601.

And now we have these 24 previously unpublished pieces. Opening the book, I was fearful that the editors had simply raided Twain's pack-ratty and near-bottomless remains drawer. But that fear turns out to be largely unfounded. To be clear, there are no masterpieces here, no Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County or The Stolen White Elephant or the devastatingly hilarious Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. And certainly nothing to match his two greatest works, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi.

“ In another essay, The Privilege of the Grave, he discusses the advantages of being dead for freedom of speech”

But what we do get is unmistakably Mark Twain, often cuttingly funny, acerbic and indicative of his restless genius; though most of the pieces are finished, others tail off, or meander along sidestreams and never find their way back to the main flow. For instance, there's Jane Austen, a fragment in which Twain expresses his inability to admire the work of an author he acknowledges as brilliant, an inability owing to his view that, although “she draws her characters with sharp discrimination,” every such character is “odious.” But, losing interest, or perhaps force of opinion, he trails off abruptly.

Most of these pieces, though, are complete in themselves and collectively form a reliable impression of Twain as writer and as man. The book's title, then, is entirely apposite.

Here is Twain in his accustomed role as humorist, in such typically tall pieces as Happy Memories of the Dental Chair, featuring a dental practitioner/charlatan (Twain loved charlatans, at least as characters) who took perfect teeth as evidence of a dangerous gum disease requiring immediate, extensive, painful and expensive treatment.

And here is Twain in his less-accustomed role as media critic, in several pieces. In the first of these, Whenever I am About to Publish a Book, he declares that he tests out his manuscripts on 14 separate focus groups, including a “man and woman with no sense of humor,” a “man and woman with prodigious sense of humor,” a “Hypercritical person” and “a man who always goes to sleep.” At the same time, he has a go at professional reviewers: “I always know beforehand what the general public's verdict will be, but I never know what the professional reviewer's will be until I hear from him.” Consequently, Twain says, he can never tell whether his book is any good “until the professional reviewers, the experts, have spoken.”

In another essay, The Privilege of the Grave, he discusses the advantages of being dead for freedom of speech, presumably why he wanted so much of his work published posthumously.

Here is Twain as anti-colonialist agitator, as in his radical masterpiece Following the Equator. The Missionary in World Politics, written as an editorial for the Times of London in 1900, is a scathing attack on missionaries (many stripes of same implied) and their devastating effect on the “heathen” nations. Anyone who ever thought Twain a racist needs to read this (and many other of his works).

And, of course, there is the cynic Mark Twain, most evident in the odd and fragmented Conversations with Satan, which soon turns into a disquisition upon cigars. But I hope it will direct readers to the angry and disappointed late Twain and such works as The Mysterious Stranger and the devastating story The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.

Suspicious though I remain of collections of literary remains, I must congratulate Twain Project general editor Robert Hirst on a job well and intelligently done. This is hardly the place I would send Twain novices (it would probably be his collected tales and sketches), but it is a book well worth the having, and not for enthusiasts alone.

Martin Levin is books editor of The Globe and Mail. His uncompleted doctoral thesis was about Mark Twain and slavery.