A recent, unsuccessful bid on a group of Lincoln biblio-books from the collection of Louise Taper leads me here. That, and a rediscovery last week among a group of books I acquired shortly before moving my library three years ago. Both instances germinated an idea into an essay – the early collecting of printed material on the Great Emancipator.
Works by and about Abraham Lincoln, called broadly “Lincolniana,” has been avidly sought by collectors since the Civil War. Lincoln’s life from homespun roots to statesman to martyr has drawn interest from every conceivable angle. Publications abound. As early as 1910 there were already more than 125 separate biographies published.
Often when I am doing biblio-research, I’m the first to clear a path (or follow one much overgrown). I soon discovered this was not the case with Lincoln. The early collecting of Lincoln has been documented directly by collectors such as Daniel Fish (1848-1924) and Joseph Oakleaf (1858-1930), and in secondary essays, most notably J. L. McCorison’s “The Great Lincoln Collectors and What Came of Them” (1947).
So, a brief overview is at hand without a lot of hacking through the underbrush. This will be interwoven with my own story of a terrific find. The early groundbreakers in collecting Lincoln material included Andrew Boyd and Charles Henry Hart. Boyd and Hart compiled the first major bibliographic work, Memorial Lincoln Bibliography (1870). These men and others like William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, laid the foundation for subsequent major collectors to follow. The next group of enthusiasts, labeled the “Big Five” each built fabulous collections during the 1890s-1920s. Despite the fierce competition among them, they all interacted as friends and colleagues, each to varying degrees willing to help the others and share new discoveries.
