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John Wooden, the enlightened dean of college basketball coaches, claimed, “A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.” That was the case with Mark Twain, who coached his good friend, U.S. Grant, into writing one of the best autobiographies and best presidential books ever written.

Twain convinced Grant to write his “Personal Memoirs,” helped edit the manuscript for punctuation and grammar, and paid the author, whom he always called “General Grant,” 70 percent of the book’s considerable profits. Twain’s famous “Notice” in “Huckleberry Finn” that begins, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted,” is signed “By Order of the Author, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.”

Even Mark Twain needed literary assistance. His coach was American author and editor William Dean Howells, who proofread copies of many Twain manuscripts and advised some significant improvements. After reading an early draft of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” for example, Howells urged Twain to remove a whole chapter about rafting and use it in “Life on the Mississippi,” which helped fill out that inconsistent book while tautening “Finn.”

I quickly tell ready listeners that any book published as “THE Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is suspect because Twain’s real title omits the “The.” I learned this reading the library’s copy of the always authoritative Library of America edition of Twain’s “Mississippi Writings,” which includes that classic novel.

There are many notable features of the Library of America series that make it an aesthetic pleasure to hold and read, but their diligence in using only the most authentic manuscripts impresses me.

“Adoration” is too mild a term for my admiration of the LOA series. In it the best transcripts of the complete works of the greatest American writers are complied into eminently readable and useful volumes. They’re printed on acid-free paper approved by the American National Standards and, according to LOA literature, “bound with the grain of the paper to ensure they will open easily and lie flat without crinkling or buckling.”

The binding boards in the covers are strong, yet flexible enough to “make the book light, easy to carry, trim in appearance, and a pleasure to hold.” The type font is Galliard, which is “exceptionally readable and easy on the eyes.” From the dyed-in-the-thread woven rayon binding cloth to the ribbon page marker, these are exceptionally well-made books.

The LOA series has many content features, too. For instance, Grant’s memoirs include exhaustive notes and index, a complete chronology of his life, and his personal letters from West Point on. It even includes the notes Grant wrote to his doctor after cancer took his larynx during his final 6 months of life in which he wrote his masterpiece.

Twain, on the other hand, needed nearly a decade to write “Finn.” He began it in 1876 while finishing “Tom Sawyer,” but it languished for the next seven years. He might never have finished it had typewriters not been invented.

Twain hired some of the very first typists to prepare his hand-written “Life on the Mississippi” manuscript in 1883. He was so impressed by the result that he had them type the 400 handwritten pages comprising the part he completed of his second “boy’s book,” as he referred to “Finn.” Twain was “the first author to submit a novel in typescript,” according to Stephen Fischer’s “A History of Writing.”

In his biography of Twain, Ron Power writes how this “eliminated the clutter of an annotated draft manuscript. For the first time, Mark Twain could make a second round of revisions on clean pages, and he used that opportunity to full advantage.”

Fischer noted, “the invention of the typewriter also changed writing’s method, appearance and role in society — its keyboard underlies today’s PC revolution.”

You’ll still find typewriters at the public library, as well as word processors, Wi-Fi and fast Internet connections. There’s also old-fashioned books-on-tape and video cassettes, because the library’s coach, the public, still wants them.

As the American writer Thomas Fleming put it, “Actors yearn for the perfect director, athletes for the perfect coach, priests for the perfect pope, presidents for the perfect historian. Writers hunger for the perfect reviewer.”