In his essay on "Illustrating Huck Finn," Kemble also said that he'd never drawn "negroes" before his work on MT's novel, but that is certainly an error. "The Thompson Street Poker Club" was a regular feature of Life magazine in the Spring of 1884, while MT was looking about for an illustrator, and for that feature Kemble regularly drew caricatures of African Americans. Perhaps Kemble was making a distinction between the free urban blacks whose antics are chronicled in the "Poker Club" sketches, and the enslaved southern blacks he first drew for MT's novel. Since MT found Kemble through his work in Life, it seems likely that, as Earl F. Briden has suggested, he was familiar with Kemble's "stylistic approach to blacks" when told his publisher to hire Kemble for the novel. Below are examples of Kemble's pre-Huck representations of blacks in Life, as scanned from their re-publication in the book The Thompson Street Poker Club (New York: Mitchell & Miller, 1884):