President Barack Obama this week signed into law a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-9) to mint a Mark Twain commemorative coin that will provide an economic boost to Missouri by enhancing Twain’s Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal.

Under the new law, the U.S. Mint will produce for a limited time, $1 silver and $5 gold coins in honor of the world famous writer. The sale price of each coin will be calculated at the combined total of each coin’s respective face value, production and design costs, and a surcharge remitted by the U.S. Treasury to the recipient organizations, thereby costing taxpayers nothing.

“I want to thank the president for signing this legislation into law and I appreciate the efforts of all the folks back home that have worked so hard for so long to make this day possible,” Luetkemeyer said. “Twain’s Boyhood home attracts people from all over the world and brings much-needed jobs and economic development to the state and this law will certainly boost those efforts.”

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal commemorates the childhood of a man who grew up to be one of the most recognized names in literature. Twain would eventually move to Hartford, Connecticut, where he settled down, built a house and began to work on what would become his most famous work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Other sites benefiting from the surcharge include the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, New York and the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, California.