Jap Herron was a novel written, supposedly, by a deceased Mark Twain from beyond the grave, dictated via the medium of a Ouija board. The scribe (faithfully taking down notes, or perhaps a little more than just that, depending on your view) was Emily Grant Hutchings, a woman who had actually corresponded with Twain 15 years earlier. In their exchange of letters he had given her advice and, interestingly, also marked one of her letters with the words: "Idiot! Must preserve". According to the lengthy introduction by Hutchings, "The Coming of Jap Herron", she and a woman named Lola Hays began receiving messages from Twain in 1915 when playing around with a Ouija board at a spiritualist meeting in St. Louis. Dallying with such occult techniques was not unusual for the time, and it seems receiving literary output from the great beyond was not so unusual either. The Jap Herron book came out at a time when the Ouija board communications of "Patience Worth" via St. Louis writer Pearl Curran, a friend of Hutchings (who was present during the first "communications" with Worth), was also capturing national attention. Indeed, as a New York Times article of the time remarks, Jap Herron was "the third novel in the last few months that has claimed the authorship of some dead and gone being who, unwilling to give up human activities, has appeared to find in the ouija board a material means of expression". This was, however, the most high profile author to be have been involved. Twain's daughter, Clara Clemens, took particular issue with the book, and she, along with the publishers Harper and Brothers, who for 17 years had owned the sole rights to Twain's works, went to court to halt the publication. In response, Hutchings and Hays, with the help of a certain Professor Hyslop, claimed that Clara's father (after more Ouija board activity) was "in a state of intellectual torture because of the difficulty he is having in getting his momentous work into print". The case, however, never went to trial as Hutchings eventually agreed to cease publication, and destroy any copies they could find, meaning surviving copies of the book are extremely rare.