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The Lincoln Memorial Album-Imortelles. Being Sketches and Tributes by Two Hundred Eminent Americans… [Publisher’s circular].

New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers, [ca. 1882]. Illustrated circular, 11” x 8.5”. [4] pp. CONDITION: Very good, light soiling to top of p. 1, horizontal and vertical folds.

A rare illustrated publisher’s circular advertising an important early Lincoln memorial volume, containing selected speeches and writings alongside personal recollections by 200 “eminent” contemporaries.

Publishers G. W. Carleton & Co. of New York here announce The Lincoln Memorial Album-Imortelles, the first memorial volume of its kind, edited by “the first dedicated collector of Lincolniana,” Ohio-born veteran Osborn Oldroyd (Peterson, p. 86). Available by subscription and bound in either “English Cloth” or sheep, Oldroyd’s compilation presents “the best of all the Speeches, Writings and Sayings of Lincoln,” arranged with “the Opinions and Tributes…from 200 of the Most Eminent Men of our Country, with their fac-simile Autographs.” The second page of the circular shows the National Lincoln Monument at Springfield (dedicated in 1874). An “Index to Contributors” appears on the third page, including poets, journalists, justices, congressmen, former presidents, professors, divines, and military men, among them W. T. Sherman, Wendell Phillips, James Garfield, and John G. Whittier. A sampling of the facsimile autographs of these great men and women fill the final page.

“Almost anyone who had encountered Lincoln in a significant way felt compelled sooner or later to tell about it, often less with a view to adding to the historical record than to caressing Lincoln’s memory. As the supply and demand for reminiscences fed each other, they were sought out, collected, and published in large volumes. The first of these was The Lincoln Memorial: Album Imortelles, edited by Osborn Oldroyd in 1882.…and about the time this book was published he moved into the old Lincoln homestead in Springfield and turned it into a museum of relics and memorabilia,” the contents of which he later sold to the U.S. government (Peterson, p. 86).

No examples recorded in OCLC.

An appealing publisher’s circular issued by publishers of an early and important volume celebrating the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, issued seventeen years after the president’s death.

REFERENCES: Peterson, Merrill D. Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press 1994).

Item #10399

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