BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Visit this quiet corner of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, and you might get a case of literary deja vu.

"There's rare collected works of Mark Twain, there are first editions of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'" said Amy Pickard, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library Rare Book Curator

However, anyone could travel the globe and not find another one of these.

"This is the only place in the world that has 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' manuscript," Pickard said. "There were passages in the manuscript that we didn't know about. Passages that had been omitted in the published version of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'"

In a way, the pages' journey here to the Mark Twain Room began almost 150 years ago, in 1869.

That's when Twain, real name, Samuel Clemens, made the move to Buffalo.

"In order to really support the girl that he had become engaged to," said Thomas Reigstad, Twain biographer. "He had to get full-time employment after this lifetime of being a vagabond."

His father-in-law gave him the money to buy one-third interest in the Buffalo Morning Express, where he became a managing editor and reporter.

The job, along with money his wife inherited when his father-in-law died in 1870, gave him the freedom to pursue side projects, like penning stories for magazines and beginning to write his book "Roughing It."

"Buffalo was a real vital way-station for him in his career," Reigstad said. "It helped him to move in the direction of being an author rather than a journalist."

Years after Twain left his Delaware Avenue mansion for Hartford, CT, in 1871, a local manuscript collector asked him for a copy of "Huck Finn."

He made the request on library letterhead, with the understanding that the pages would be entrusted to the library to be preserved and made available to the public.

Twain sent about 400 pages, which the collector had bound, but for years, it was believed at least half of the manuscript was destroyed.

After the collector's death, they turned up in an unexpected place, Hollywood.

"His descendant had possession of them, although she claims she wasn't really aware of it," Pickard said. "She discovered them in an attic, in a truck."

Her attempt to auction the pages off led to a 17-month long legal dispute and the eventual reunion of both halves of the book.

Twain's mansion and the Swan Street boarding house he stayed in at one point are gone, and one biographer says even historical markers denoting his time here are scarce.

However, visitors from around the world are still drawn to the city he'd continue to own property in and return to throughout his life to catch this glimpse of handwritten history.