A Big Ol' Box o' Lincoln

While this hardly mitigates the dustjacket design, seeing The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, in a boxed set from Library of America, goes a long way to making me happier about trying to sell the book.
I've been trying to get the two volumes of Speeches and Writings back into the store in time for the Bicentennial, but I hadn't had any luck. Now I understand why. Redesigned with red and blue covers, and boxed with the anthology, they make a handsome, if a little on-the-nose design for this bran new presentation.

The two volumes of Lincoln are about the best presentation of Lincoln's words I've ever seen. They are certainly the best and most attractive collections of Lincoln that I own.

At $99.95 the new set is expensive, but had I not already bought separately the three books in it, I would be saving my pennies to get this one some day soon, before it disappears.

Their Lincoln (and Ours)

Eric Foner is exactly the kind of history professor from whom I wish I could take a class; erudite, serious and excited by his subject.  Reading his books, particularly A Short History of Reconstruction and Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, I've become convinced that if there is anyone who can teach me what it meant to be alive in America then, and what the lives of Americans then might and ought to mean to us now, it is Eric Foner.  

His book  The Story of American Freedom is one of those titles I have been pressing into the willing and reluctant hands of customers and coworkers since it's original publication.  I know the title sounds like one of those well intentioned freshman Seminars, taught in an anonymous, drafty lecture hall by some dessicated old party with a slide projector, and actually conducted by weary TAs roaming the aisles with dusty pages of "supplemental readings," but you must trust me when I tell you, it is actually one of the most breathtakingly wide-ranging and scintillating acts of American intellectual history I've ever read.  Reading Foner as he traces the progression of "freedom" and "liberty" through our history, is not unlike spending time, at least as I imagine it, in the personal library of a great bibliophile and conversationalist who darts from his chair every few minutes to produce the exact text he's been quoting from memory, just to show you yet another surprising instance of our mania for, and wildly contradictory usage of, the great watch-words and shibboleths of representative democracy.  It is the author's enthusiasm, as well as his scholarship, that makes him such good company.

Now, for the Lincoln Bicentennial, Eric Foner has edited a new collection of popular essays from noted scholars -- no mean trick in my experience as a reader of history -- on subjects ranging from his own thoughtful consideration of the embarrassing topic of "Lincoln and Colonization," to James M. McPherson's brief summation of "A. Lincoln, Commander in Chief" (which I highly recommend if you don't intend to read McPherson's recent full-length treatment of the subject, reviewed in an earlier posting here.)  Foner's new book is called Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, from W. W. Norton.  In addition to Harold Holzer on Lincoln and art, and Mark E. Neely, Jr. on Lincoln and the Constitution, there are names less familiar to me and essays I was surprised to find myself enjoying thoroughly.  David W. Blight, for example, I did not know.  The very title of his essay, "The Theft of Lincoln in Scholarship, Politics and Public Memory," made me jumpy.  That word "theft" has the spin to it of literary-theory and "historiology" --id est gab about rather than history written.  But it actually proved to be one of my favorites in the collection; taking on the Lincoln pietists, bully patriots, politicians and revisionists all at a go!  Now I must find Blight's latest book, A Slave No More; Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, from 2007, and put my embarrassing suspicions to rest.

I would encourage anyone interested in contemporary Lincoln scholarship to seek out this new collection, without a worry that the common reader will find anything therein but consistently well written, thoughtful, and "theory"-free American history of the best kind. (Foucault, for example, is blessedly absent entirely from the index.  Can I get an "Amen?")

Holzer & Company

In an earlier post, I already expressed my deep displeasure at just how awful the design of the dustjacket is.  But, as I suspected I would, I've now become convinced by the contents that I shall have to have my own copy of Harold Holzer's new Library of America title, The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now.  It is a rich and varied collection -- boy howdy and how.

Where else, exactly, can one find, between two covers, H. L. Mencken's sobering and mirthful essay from his Prejudices: Third Series, in which one finds the "Lincoln legend" so perfectly described as "... a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost," and also Langston Hughes' poem "Lincoln Monument: Washington?"  Holzer has bundled together a wonderfully eclectic collection of people, from contemporaries to biographers, from cartoonists to politicians; from H. G. Wells to Dale Carnegie (!), from Emerson to E. L. Doctorow, and on and on.

Better yet, Harold Holzer has written a brief, often quite pithy preface for each entry.  This from the introduction to Woodrow Wilson's contribution: "Left entirely unmentioned in Wilson's eloquent address were slavery and emancipation -- omissions that were not surprising in light of Wilson's segregation of black government employees and his effusive praise for D. W. Griffith's racist screen epic The Birth of a Nation."

Unlike some earlier anthologies from the Library of America, and here I'm thinking specially of their truly weird collection of Sermons, this volume, in the very capable hands of Harold Holzer, manages to present the familiar and the unknown -- at least to me -- in an entirely satisfying and endlessly surprising way.

As tributes go, this is one of the best, if not the best to date on the occasion of the Bicentennial. 

A. Lincoln Comes to Seattle

Thanks to our own Stesha Brandon and the good folks in our Events Department, we will be hosting no less a personage than Ronald C. White, Jr. on January 27th, at 7PM, right here in the store. This is exciting news. A. Lincoln: A Biography, Professor White's new book, was just released today and has already received glowing endorsements from the likes of James M. McPherson, Daniel Walker Howe, Harold Holzer and Jon Meacham, author of the bestselling American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House!

I've only just begun White's book, but I am excited already at the prospect of hearing so eminent a scholar speak on the 16th President. His earlier work includes Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural and The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words.

It should be a very interesting evening and I encourage everyone with an interest in Lincoln to come out to the bookstore to hear this author. I've just started his book and find myself sailing through to page 159, which leaves me only 517 pages yet to go -- and I fear the book will prove to be all too short.

Lincoln Remainders

Our Discount Books buyers have been scouting for Lincoln books, and the first few are in. Remainders, for any who might not know the bookseller lingo, are titles the publishers are discontinuing so the remaining stock is sold off at a higher discount, meaning lower prices for readers.

The prices are great, but the quantities are limited, so if you want any of these, you'd best hurry in before they are gone. (Once they're gone, they're gone for good.)

Just a few titles:

Holland's Life of Abraham Lincoln is one of the first major Lincoln biographies, published not long after Lincoln's death, by the founder of Scribner's Magazine. $7.98 in paperback.

Lincoln in The Times: The Life of Abraham Lincoln as Originally Reported in The New York Times, edited by David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer -- two names that should be familiar to Lincoln readers (and to readers of this blog.) $8.98 in hardcover.

Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery, by Richard Striner. $9.98 in hardcover.

Black Men Built the Capital: Discovering African-American History in and Around Washington, D.C., by Jesse Holland -- referenced in a number of recent articles about the incoming administration and the changing face of the Nation's capital. Only $5.98 in paperback.

Many more to come, so keep an eye on this blog and the Bargain Books tables in the main lobby!

Trials of a President Elect

Harold Holzer is a remarkable scholar with more than forty books to his credit, the majority to do with Lincoln. Of his earlier books, I particularly enjoyed Lincoln at Cooper Union, which won him the Lincoln Prize, though that's just one of the many awards his work has won.  

Holzer's new book, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860 - 1861, is a meticulous survey of one of the most difficult and controversial periods in Lincoln's life. At the time of his election, the 16th President of the United States was faced with a divided nation. He had received a substantial majority in the North, but in the South, and the West, Lincoln had no such mandate, in many Southern states his name had not even appeared on the ballot! Many secessionists were waiting for Lincoln's election to provide the final straw that would break the Union apart. As a result, even Lincoln's personal safety was to become an issue before he'd ever taken the Oath. Additionally, there was the curious custom, not to be abolished until FDR, that delayed the transition for months after the election was decided. All of these factors contributed to perhaps the worst presidential transition in the nation's history.

And then there was Abraham Lincoln himself. Holzer examines the historical consensus on this period, and Lincoln's performance as President Elect, and takes issue with much that has been written and assumed to date. In a genuinely fascinating account of what Lincoln and his contemporaries actually said and did during ridiculously difficult and mutable circumstances, the historian reconstructs both the period and the man in light of recent scholarship and the historical record. Holzer's conclusions can be startling as well as reassuring, and more importantly, they are never arbitrary. His portrait therefore is a careful one, of a very careful man in an all but impossible position. Holzer's Lincoln is still untried, not yet "Father Abraham," and that makes this one of the most interesting biographical studies to have seen print in this new season of Lincoln abundance.