The Little Leather Library Corporation New York — Memories of President Lincoln by Walt Whitman
Many years ago a small book was given to me. And when I say small I mean three inches by four, covered in green leather, embossed with the title Memories of President Lincoln, with the authors name, Walt Whitman, embossed below.
The contents consist of three of Whitman’s poems, starting with ‘When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloomed’, followed by ‘Drum Taps’, and lastly ‘Song of the Open Road’, all of which celebrate not only Lincoln, but the very ideas of freedom and democracy that had been deep in that president’s heart, and the heart of Whitman.
My little book was published in the early 1920s by the Little Leather Library Corporation of New York, a company which had been set up in 1914 by brothers Charles and Albert Boni with the idea of producing small leather bound books of classic literary works. They had no success with the idea until they met Harry Scherman and Maxwell Sackheim, two ad men working for the J. Walter Thompson Agency, who managed, in 1916, to persuade the Whitman Candy Company (no relation to Walt) to place one of their small books in each box of their candy. Harry and Maxwell, and the Boni brothers managed to raise the $5,000 needed to print off several hundred copies of the first tiny volume, which was a selection of William…
