Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.
Number 33 of the publisher's signed, limited, and numbered issue of the first edition
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926. Signed, limited, and numbered issue of the first edition. Hardcover. This two-volume set is the publisher's signed, limited, and numbered issue of the first edition of Carl Sandburg’s biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Distinct from the trade edition, the publisher issued 260 copies “on imported Dutch charcoal rag paper, numbered and signed by the author, of which 250 copies are for sale.” Each set was hand-numbered in red on the half-title verso limitation statement, below which Sandburg signed in black.
This limited issue is bound in quarter cream buckram with paper spine labels over blue laid paper-covered boards. The contents, featuring untrimmed fore and bottom edges and gilt top edges, are bound with blue and yellow silk head and foot bands and endpapers of the same blue laid paper as the boards. This is set number "33" marked thus in red ink on each limitation page above the author's signature "Carl Sandburg" in black. Condition is very good. The bindings are square and tight. The fragile, paper-covered boards show only minor scuffs and blemishes, the corners showing only a little wear, but no bumps. The even more fragile paper spine labels are intact, and both the labels and buckram spines show modest toning, with faint differential toning to the lower spines potentially indicating previous labels, of which no trace remains. The contents are clean with no spotting. Mild age-toning is readily apparent only to the untrimmed fore and bottom edges. The gilt top edges each feature the three-line ink stamp of "Corrigan Memorial Library | St. Joseph's Seminary | Yonkers, New York". The same ink stamp is applied to the bottom edges of each volume. The circular ink stamp of "St. Joseph's Seminary" of "Yonkers, New York" is found on each title page verso, with some ink transfer to the facing rectos. Each rear pastedown features the tiny, printed ticket of a Los Angeles bookseller at the upper left and some adhesive residue, presumably from bookplate removal, at the pastedown center.
Equal parts biography, work of literature, and epic prose poem, Carl Sandburg’s (1878-1967) monumental, multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln has been called “the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln.” Sandburg seemed an unlikely figure to write a biography of an American President. Sandburg was not a writer of prose, much less history. He was widely acclaimed for his poetry, which included Chicago Poems (1916) and Cornhuskers (1918), for which he received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
Abraham Lincoln was a lifelong fascination for Sandburg, who collected information about the iconic President for decades before he began writing about him. These first two volumes, The Prairie Years, were published in 1926, a 344,000-word study covering Lincoln’s life up to his move to Washington to become the President of the United States.
Sandburg’s work was heralded for its singular point of view. Historian Allan Nevins called it “homely but beautiful, learned but simple, exhaustively detailed but panoramic… unlike any other biography or history in the language.” Another historian called The Prairie Years “A poem of the human spirit, not Lincoln’s spirit only.”
“Sandburg had planned to stop writing about Lincoln after the publication of The Prairie Years.” Nonetheless, “for the next thirteen years he researched and wrote about the President’s last four years.” (NPS) The ultimate result was the four-volume Pulitzer-Prize winning biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, published in 1939.
There was also a publisher’s signed, limited, and numbered issue of The War Years, but more than twice as many sets were issued (525) as for The Prairie Years. Moreover, the signed, limited issue of The War Years was bound in less handsome though sturdier brown buckram. Hence, of the two sets, The Prairie Years is the more elusive. Item #008468
Price: $1,000.00