Abraham Lincoln 1809 - 1858 By Albert Beveridge 1928 Abraham Lincoln 1809 - 1858 By Albert J. Beveridge, Boston And New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1928, In Two Volumes, both volumes have copyright dates of 1928, which makes this set a first edition (per McBride), and the copyright page says “Copyright, 1928, By Catherine Beveridge, All Rights Reserved”, which means the copyright was owned by Albert Beveridge’s wife. Both volumes are 3/4 bound, with five raised bands, six gilt-ruled compartments with gilt titles and gilt devices inside the compartments, the original blue cloth, blue endpapers, a half-title, and the top edges are gilt. Volume I has a frontis portrait of Lincoln, a six-page Preface and three pages of Contents, a list of Illustrations, twelve pages of the “Works Cited In These Volumes”, followed by 607 pages of text, and an owner’s inscription in the front which reads “George W. Mittern, Dec. 5, 1928”. Volume II has a frontis portrait of Stephen A. Douglas (“S .A. Douglas”), three pages of Contents, a list of Illustrations, 713 pages of text and a twenty-seven page Index, for a total of 741 pages. The frontis portraits of Lincoln and Douglas have facsimile signatures. Albert Beveridge (1862 - 1927) was a lawyer, Freemason, and U.S. Senator from Indiana, and his biography of Lincoln was projected to be a four-volume set, but it was only half-finished because Beveridge died in 1927, which accounts for why the volumes covered Lincoln’s life only till 1858. Beveridge’s wife gave her husband’s notes to Carl Sandburg and the last two volumes of the biography were edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, another important historian who worked on collections of documents from the Founding Fathers. Beveridge won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of John Marshall, The Life of John Marshall, published in 1916 - 1919, and Beveridge spent most of his final years writing the biography of Abraham Lincoln, which was posthumously published in two volumes in 1928. His biography was very scholarly and stripped away the myths about Lincoln to reveal a complex and imperfect politician. In 1939, the American Historical Association established the Beveridge Award in his memory through a gift from his widow and donations from members. The books are 8vo. and measure 9 5/8 x 6 3/4 in. wide, with clean pages and tight bindings, a slight hinge crack near the front of Volume I, a speck of rubbing at the crown and bumps and wear on the top right tip at the rear of the second volume, and still an attractive first-edition set about the life of Abraham Lincoln. #1677 #36