Things Lincoln never said

[Steve Whitlock]

"My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."

This (apparent) Lincoln quote is included in one of the articles in the latest edition of the Lincoln Herald.

I am not familiar with a legitimate source for this quote. Does anyone know of one?

Roger,

This may not be legitimate enough, but Wikiquote says:

Did Lincoln say, "My best friend..."

~~02/17/14~~ Did Lincoln say, "My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read"?

I see this all over the Internet, but I can't find it on Wikiquote.org's Lincoln page.—This unsigned comment is by 184.98.228.11 (talk • contribs) .

It seems so. The article "Abe Lincoln and His Books" by Frances Cavanah, published in 1953 by the Wilson Library Bulletin magazine, makes a similar attribution to Lincoln; it reads:

"My best friend," he told his cousin, Dennis Hanks, "is a man who can give me a book I ain't read." [4]

But there are many other, earlier, (and sometimes contradictory,) accounts; one claims that Lincoln said to Judge Pitcher, "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll git me a book I ain't read." ([5], Lockridge A. Lincoln [1930], p. 42.) Perhaps Lincoln said this to both his cousin and Pitcher, as suggested here (Sandburg Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years [1929], pp. 42–43). A plausible source for this very quote is given in The Lincoln Treasury (1950) as follows:

"The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll git me a book I ain't read." (Circa 1825 —Sandburg, Prairie Years, I, p. 71 [6])
******************