Where Is It?

[Rob Wick]

Thanks, Steve. It was certainly frustrating.

First, let me say this. There is no direct reference to the picture taken by Hall or to Hall himself in the Bobbs-Merrill papers. I can’t sit here and tell you that these are the only letters between Barton and the publisher given that I have some letters from the University of Chicago collection that were copied by a researcher I hired in Chicago. I asked him to find material related to Bobbs-Merrill but limited him to eight hours, so I have no idea what he left out. I will add that the Bobbs-Merrill papers, which come from the Lilly Library at Indiana University, are the company files so one would expect that they are complete in terms of what Barton sent them, but not necessarily in what they sent Barton, although I have to say the files seem to me rather comprehensive. All told it measures about one linear foot.

That said, another anomaly arises. The files from 1925 to 1926 average about two or two and one-half inches thick. The 1927 file is about ¾ of an inch to one inch thick. I can’t explain why that is. There’s nothing in the files that gives any clues as to why this might be.

That said, I can still provide a brief history of the publication of the book.

The first mention by Barton as to his interest in writing the book came in a letter to Bobbs-Merrill in April of 1926. Barton wrote to David Chambers, vice-president of Bobbs-Merrill, “Now I have two or three small Lincoln affairs in mind, none so unimportant as “A Beautiful Blunder” but small compared with what I have in the Life and in comparison with what I have in mind to do in a popular one volume Life of Lincoln, after Beveridge is out and Warren is out and the sale of my two volume work slacks. They are, “The Women Lincoln Loved” “Lucy Hanks” “The Lineage of Lincoln” and “Lincoln and Walt Whitman.” Chambers was enthusiastic about the planned projects, but nothing was discussed further, and Barton was busy reading proofs of his children’s book about Lincoln called “A Great and Good Man.”

One thing I noticed in the correspondence about that book is that Barton took the lead in obtaining photographs and illustrations, noting that he had “plenty of pictures” that could be used, but adding that he preferred to see illustrations as well.

The next mention in 1926 comes in July when Barton notified Chambers that The Ladies Home Journal had accepted for its February, 1927 issue the chapter Barton was writing on Ann Rutledge. “This pleases me,” Barton wrote. “I will now cut the insides of the book into chapters and throw each child to a separate shelf.” Barton was anxious to bring the book out, and hoped for a Spring 1927 publication date. However, Chambers urged Barton to slow down, noting that he would be competing with himself if he brought too many books out at once. Chambers wrote, “THE WOMEN LINCOLN LOVED sounds to me like a popular book. We want to do it of course, and hope we may have it for next fall, the fall of 1927, in which case LINCOLN AND WHITMAN can wait for the spring of 1928. But I don’t think we ought to try to bring out two of your books, and particularly two Lincoln books, in one period, and you haven’t forgotten that we are scheduling THE GREAT AND GOOD MAN for this spring. One book a season is really all that the trade can absorb.”

By December of 1926, Barton was sending to Bobbs-Merrill various chapters of the book, most of which had been published in different magazines, including one on Lucy Hanks that Liberty Magazine accepted and another in the Dearborn Independent. It appears to me, then, that Barton was working on it piecemeal, whenever he found a free moment.

The only reference I found to the photos in 1927 was in a six-page memorandum from Chambers to Barton dated March 8, 1927. In a postscript, Chambers wrote “The illustrations should not be fanciful or imaginative. They should consist of full portraits available, pictures of homes—that sort of thing. Do you agree? Will you start assembling material?” The papers include no response from Barton. The book was published in October, 1927.

Basically, that’s all I found in the Barton papers. Not really much in the way of help,

Best
Rob