File:Biographies and stories of Abraham Lincoln (1865) (14578572237).jpg

Identifier: biographiesstor00linc (find matches)
Title: Biographies and stories of Abraham Lincoln
Year: 1886 (1880s)
Authors: Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection
Subjects: Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 Presidents
Publisher:
Contributing Library: Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection
Digitizing Sponsor: Friends of The Lincoln Collection of Indiana, Inc.

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enueto collecting for those who areunable to collect the now shock-ingly costly rarities that weresought by previous genera-tions of collectors. I could notrecommend collecting Lincolnbooks with trade bindings as aspecialty. They are too few innumber to fill a collectingcareer, for one thing. Foranother, not enough of thegreat book designers are repre-sented among these Lincolnbooks to make it altogethersatisfying as an exclusive col-lecting interest. Finally, tradebindings seem to have been afeature especially of juvenileand very popularly orientedLincoln books, and one wouldtherefore be faced with col-lecting mostly books whosesole virtue lies on their coversrather than within them. Iwould never recommendacquiring a collection of booksthat are not worth reading.They do make a charmingaddition to any Lincoln col-lection, however. Before 1880, CharlesGullans and John Espeyinform us in American TradeBindings and Their Designers,1880-1915 (in Jean Peters, ed.,Collectible Books: Some New
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From the Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum FIGURE 1. Perhaps the best illustrated Lincolnbinding is this one on Horatio Alger, Jr.s TheBackwoods Boy or The Boyhood and Manhood ofAbraham Lincoln. This is a variant of Monaghan 995,noted by Monaghan for its publisher, David McKay inPhiladelphia, but not for its distinctive and handsomebinding. Monaghan described the book as a fictionalbiography for boys, but the book relies, for the mostpart, on long quotations from Lincoln himself as wellas from early Lincoln biographers. As a dean of Ameri-cas success-myth writers, Alger naturally focused onLincolns stern advice to his improvident stepbrotherJohn D. Johnston, but he included some surprisingmaterial as well. Alger quoted at length from Lincolnsspeech in opposition to the Mexican War. I am quiteaware, Alger wrote, that many of my young readerswill skip this portion as uninteresting; but I hope that ifin after years they are led to read this biography oncemore, they will count it

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