Autograph Leaves of Our Country's Authors
Baltimore: Cushings & Bailey, 1864. First printing. Lithographed vignette on title page and tailpiece. Cloth over boards. Quarto. xii, 201 pages. Good. Some splitting to lower joint, moderate scattered foxing to preliminary and postliminary leaves. Some chipping and wear to extremities. Hinges not cracked.
This remarkable volume famously contains the first facsimile of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's own hand, along with a stunning array of lithographically produced facsimiles of other authors' famous literary pieces in manuscript. The Star Spangled Banner in Francis Scott Key's hand is here. So are works by Julia Ward Howe, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many more.
This book was conceived as a fundraiser for wounded soldiers in the Civil War, and manuscript pieces were solicited from the authors themselves or from their surviving families and friends if deceased. The manuscript pieces were then transferred onto stones or plates through a special process, and the book printed entirely lithographically.
Lincoln wrote out a copy of the Gettysburg Address specifically for this volume, and that copy--known as the Bliss copy--is one of only five examples in Lincoln's hand. It hangs today in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House.
Item #961
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