Bookseller
and writer Anthony Marshall where art thou, kindred spirit? I recently discovered your two books by
chance in an Austin, Texas used bookstore – Trafficking in Old Books (1998)
and Fossicking in Old Books (2004), far from their place of publication
in Australia. There may be copies in
abundance in Australia, but they are pretty scarce here—my excuse for
overlooking them these many years. And
what an oversight! Your adventures running
an antiquarian / used bookstore in Melbourne and ancillary essays are among the
damndest, bestest, funniest biblio-writings I’ve encountered. Your prose enlightens and surprises: creative
skills meeting a worthy subject. I must
simply salute you.
But I’m just late to the party. Some sleuthing revealed you received accolades
upon publication (and just as importantly, brisk sales) primarily in Australia
and the UK, but also a foray into the US where you did a few books signings. Both books sold in the thousands of copies, not
an easy achievement. (You record a sold-out
print run of 5,000 copies for the self-published Trafficking in Old Books.) You even had a fan base and book signings in
Tasmania! Admittedly, that was much
closer to your bookshop in Melbourne than it would be to someone in America,
but it sure sounds exotic and alluring as recorded in your delightful Fossicking
essay, “Et in Tasmania Ego.”
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.
