College and Research Libraries


Presentation Copies in the Sandburg Library 

IN 1956 the University of Illinois ac-
quired the library of Carl Sandburg. The 
collection included, first of all, the works 
of Sandburg himself, original editions 
of his verse and prose, as well as transla-
tions into Swedish, French, Spanish, Por-
tuguese, Burmese, and other languages. 
There are numerous volumes to which 
Sandburg contributed prefaces or fore-
words, brochures, pamphlets, and copies 
of magazines containing articles or po-
ems. Included too are hundreds of let-
ters to Sandburg, typescripts and galley 
proofs of the voluminous Lincoln biog-
raphy, clippings, lists, notes, annotated 
excerpts from various periodicals, bound 
magazines, federal documents, memoirs, 
and histories. Not all the items are strict-
ly literary since the bulk of the material 
is swelled by photographs, scrapbooks, 
phonograph records, a collection of post-
age stamps with a portrait of Lincoln, an 
album of Lincoln pennies, souvenirs, and 
memorabilia. But one of the most inter-
esting sections of the library consists of 
the books sent to Carl Sandburg as gifts, 
almost always inscribed by the authors 
and occasionally annotated by the recipi-
ent himself. 

Every author attracts to himself as a 
magnet does steel filings the literary 
work of others, the books of friends as a 
matter of course but also publishers' 
gifts, the volumes of specialists in the 
same field, presentation copies sent by 
contemporary celebrities, and invariably 
the fledging work of y9ung poets and 
novelists sent through admiration and 
pride, or (so they sincerely say) in the 
hope of criticism. Probably no one is so 
aware of the enormous amount of verse 
published by private presses or as pres-
tige items by commercial presses as the 
established poet who has himself won 

]ANUARY ,-196} 

BY JOHN T. FLANAGAN 

Mr . Flanagan has been Professor of Eng-
lish at the University of Illinois, Urbana, 
since 1949. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 
1943-44; Newberry Fellow in 1944, and Ful-
bright lecturer at Bordeaux in 1952-53. 

success in print and very likely on the 
lecture platform. His weekly mail swells 
his library shelves with thin, often hand-
some, and generally unwanted volumes. 

Presentation copies in the Sandburg li-
brary are curiously miscellaneous. There 
are a large number of high school an-
nuals, sometimes dedicated to Sandburg 
but more often including a few lines 
from a Sandburg poem which are print-
ed before the endless succession of photo-
graphs of the graduates. The collection 
includes a number of copies of Good 
Reading, a bibliographical list; a teach-
ing manual from the Altoona, Pennsyl-
vania, school system; a heavy and dull 
tome entitled The Forest Preserves of 
Cook County Illinois (Chicago, 3d e<)., 
1921); a book on health entitled The 
Therapeutics of Activity (Chicago, 1916); 
and a translation from the Italian, The 
Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio 
(1942). One of the more curious items is 
a copy of the 1928 Model "A" instruction 
book issued by the Ford Motor Company 
and autographed by Henry Ford on Sep-
tember 23, 1928. The flyleaf bears the 
following note: 

Henry never before had been asked to sign 
a manual-and I said it would give luck 
to the new car I was driving from Dearborn 
to Harbert-

C.S. 

But the most unusual book is a volume 
certainly never listed in the catalog of 
the Library of Congress, a heavily boxed 

47 



item with the label "Kentucky History 
Old Forester Ed. Vol. I" stamped on 
the spine and identified as the 1870 
work of an "author" named George Gar-
vin Brown. The curious reader who took 
this down from the shelf discovered im-
mediately that the "book" was simply a 
false front for an unopened bottle of Old 
Forester Kentucky Bourbon, 100 proof, 
complete with glasses. It must be added 
that by administrative ukase this item 
has since been removed from the col-
lection. 

Because of Sandburg's long associa-
tion with Chicago as newspaper reporter 
and feature writer, it is natural to find 
a number of books about the Windy City 
among the presentation items. Thus N el-
son Algren, sending a copy of Chicago: 
City On the Make (1951), inscribed his 
gift: 

for Carl Sandburg, 
who loved the girl called Chicago first, 
best and truest of all. 

John Drury, a Chicago newspaperman, 
wrote on the flyleaf of his Chicago in 
Seven Days (1928), "To Carl Sandburg, 
Your poetry fir~t opened my eyes to Chi-
cago, Carl." When Drury later published 
his Old Chicago Houses (1941), he dedi-
cated the book to Sandburg, "whose 
poems were beacons illuminating new 
paths to me." The Chicago surgeon Max 
Thorek, sending an inscribed copy of his 
autobiography, A Surgeon's World (1943), 
wrote: "From a tyro in writing to a 
master Carl Sandburg In appreciation of 
his gifts particularly his Americanism." 
Richard Henry Little, in 1930 the con-
ductor of the Chicago Tribune column 
"A Line O'Type or Two," presented 
Sandburg with a copy of the annual en-
titled The Linebook. One of the most 
sincere of these tributes came from Ruth 
McKenna (Mrs. Mayer) in the form of a 
letter attached to a copy of Chicago 
These First Hundred Years (1933). 

Dear Mr. Sandburg, 
I am sending you a small book which I 

have written. My first book. 

I am sending it to you because five lines of 
your poem "Smoke and Steel" have been a 
sort of window through which I've looked at 
my subject. 

These lines are: 
"A bar of steel-it is only 

Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the 
blood of a man. 

A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran 
somewhere else, 

And left-smoke and the blood of a man 
And the finished steel, chilled and blue." 
Although, besides "Smoke and Steel" I've 

enjoyed your other poems and your prose, 
the five lines just quoted have meant most to 
me. Perhaps they've meant more than any-
thing else I have read. So I'm one of the 
many thousands who sincerely thank you for 
them. 

They are at the head of my book. I hope 
you'll find the pages which follow somewhat 
of a credit to them. 

Any newly published Lincoln book as 
a matter of course found its way to the 
Sandburg library shelves, often with an 
appreciative tribute scribbled on the end 
pages or title page. Ida M. Tarbell sent 
a copy of In the Footsteps of the Lincolns 
(1924), with the greeting, "To Carl Sand-
burg from His Admiring Friend." In the 
same year the great Lincoln collector 
Oliver R. Barrett presented Sandburg 
with a copy of a reprint of Lincoln's last 
Springfield speech in the 1858 campaign, 
inscribed "To my good friend Carl Sand-
burg." Emanuel Hertz, author of A bra-
ham Lincoln, The Tribute of the Syna-
gogue (1927), remarked in his presenta-
tion copy, "To Carl Sandburg to whom 
all Lincoln lovers are indebted." Paul 
M. Angle, compiler in 1930 of New Let-
ters and Papers of Lincoln, was particu-
larly appreciative of past encouragement. 
He wrote: "To Carl Sandburg, who has 
said more · kind words about this book 
than it deserves." Margaret Leech (Mrs. 
Ralph Pulitzer), then at work on her no-
table Reveille in Washington, was moved 
by her enthusiasm for The War Years to 
write on November 15, 1939: 

For four years, I have steadily explored the 
period in preparation for a book, now near-

48 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH' LIBRARIES 



ing completion, on the city of Washington 
during the Civil War. New light on the capi-
tal therefore came to me with especial pleas-
ure; though scarcely less, I think, than the 
fascination of getting familiar events trans-
muted through a vivid and keen intelligence. 

The distinguished biographer of Robert 
E. Lee sent Sandburg a reprinted edi-
torial from his Richmond News Leader 
on March 26, 1950, and commented: 

To Carl Sandburg 
who may smile at the hexameters hidden in 
the prose form, but he will understand the 
sentiment, I know, as surely as he will the 
affection of 

Douglas Southall Freeman 

The late Professor James G. Randall, 
long an intimate friend of Sandburg, pre-
sented a revised version of his Constitu-
tional Problems Under Lincoln (1951), 
and wrote: 

Dear Carl: 
There's only one Carl Sandburg, so I'd 

better quit wishing I could write like you. 
You don't have to read all of this obese 

tome, but in the "Foreword" you may find 
some things we have talked about. 

One of the warmest messages of grati-
tude came from Roy P. Basler, who in-
scribed a copy of his edition of A braham 
Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings in 
1946 as follows: 

For Carl Sandburg-to whom I owe many 
thanks for kind words when I sent him the 
manuscript of The Lincoln Legend more 
than a decade ago and for encouragement 
through the years. May his spirit lighten the 
load and light the way for Americans forever-
more!! 

Undoubtedly the most interesting in-
scriptions in the collection appear in the 
books of successful creative writers with 
whom Sandburg had professional or per-
sonal contact. Thus on February 12, 
1920, John Drinkwater sent a copy of 
his Poems 1908-1919 addressed to Carl 
Sandberg [sic], "my friend on a slight 
acquaintance, and a poet who has helped 
and is helping to express America." Wit-

JANUARY 1963 

ter Bynner inscribed a copy of Cake 
(1926), from Santa Fe: 

To Carl-
a bite of cake-in which I hope 
he'll find a bit more than the bite-

Norman Corwin wrote on the flyleaf of 
They Fly Through the Air with the 
Greatest of Ease (1939): 

To Carl Sandburg, 
Whose verse contracts no rust, 
Whose odes are bombproof, 
And whose strophes will stand stout 
Against all floods and famine, 

epidemic war, and general decay-
whose poetry's the thing! 

Christopher Morley was succinct in his 
remarks in a copy of Thunder On the 
Left (1925): "This is Carl Sandburg's 
and so am I." John Steinbeck sent one of 
ten specially bound presentation copies 

· of The Grapes of Wrath on July 21, 
1940, with the notation: "Carl Sandburg 
in memory of a good day and a bad 
horseshoe game. Received payment 15c." 
William Saroyan wrote in a presentation 
copy of his play The Time of Your Life 
(1939): 

For Carl Sandburg 
this small book humbly and in memory 
of another circus we once saw at Madison 
Square Garden-with admiration for the 
poet and man of the people, and with gra-
titude for the miracle of his reality. 

An old friend and associate on the lec-
ture stage, Lew Sarett, sent a copy of his 
book of poems, The Box of God (1922), 
with this inscription: 

For Carl Sandburg: 
Those first heartening words, 
your confidence in me, 
the quiet smokes together, 
the seeds you planted 
in what you thought 
at times was hostile soil-
these, dear old Carl-I shall 
never forget. 

A more formal response to Sandburg's 
request for one of his books came from 
J. E. Spingarn, for many years professor 

49 



of comparative literature at Columbia 
University. He wrote on a page of The 
New Hesperides and Other Poems, 1911: 

Dear Sandburg: · 
You asked for a copy of "Creative Criti-

cism," but this too I dreamt of when I was 
climbing the ladder of my academic Purga-
tory, and some of it, here & there, may inter-
est you whenever beyond my cloister I saw 
visions of a happier America. It is a rare 
volume at least, for during the war I had the 
remaining copies destroyed. 

Ever yours, 
New York, J. E. Spingarn 

April 1, 1923 

In sending a copy of Sixteen Authors 
to One (1928), one chapter of which 
deals with Sandburg's work, David Kars-
ner wrote: 

For Carl Sandburg who does things, 
says things, writes things, and 
sings things that I like. Carl, I 
would love to live in the kind of 
America you would make, and of which 
you sing. Yours for always-

David Karsner. 

On the margin of the same page Sand-
burg himself commented: "Dave is too 
kind." 

The Colorado poet and newspaper edi-
tor, Thomas Hornsby Ferri!, gave Sand-
burg copies of two volumes of his verse. 
In a copy of High Passage (1926), he 
wrote: "Dear Carl: Even if you'd rather 
have seven pounds of asparagus, I'm 
sending you this book anyway." Later, in 
the end pages of Westering (1934), he 
drew a picture of a guitarist perched 
atop a mountain peak and added these 
lines: 

The grassy fetlocks of the bison drift 
Across another last meridian, 
All westering .. . . And I wish you & 
your zither would climb aboard. 
There are cottonwood songs to sing 
we haven't sung yet. Ever yours, 

Tom-

Among the poets who sent volumes 
with minimal inscriptions were Arthur 

Davison Ficke, William Alexander Percy, 
Jean Starr Untermeyer, Joseph Joel 
Keith, Helen Waddell, and the poet·iaur-
eate of Kentucky, Cotton N oe. Sandburg 
might have taken special delight in 
MacKinlay Kantor's Turkey-In-the-Straw 
(1935), a collection of American ballads 
and primitive verse. 

In her sole novel,' The Border. (19.31), 
Dagmar Doneghy (Mrs. Joseph Warren 
Beach) wrote: "To Carl Sandburg with 
affection, in memory of long leisurely 
breakfasts, of a battered silver . tea-spoon, 
and of the bits of cedar from the coffin, of 
Abraham Lincoln." Gregory d'Alessio, a 
cartoonist for Collier's Weekly, sent a 
copy of Welcome Home! (1945), with 
the remark: "for Carl Sanburg [sic]: A 
fellow-obsessed at that delightful insanity 
-the Guitar-" Dr. Morris Fishbein in-
scribed a copy of The Medical Follies 
(1925), "To Carl Sandburg who has no 
other follies." And Waldo Frank wrote 
in a presentation volume of Our Ameri-
ca (1919), "to Carl Sandburg whom . I 
love." · 

Many of the books of Amy Lowell and 
Louis Untermeyer appear in the Sand-
burg library. Miss Lowell's comments are 
generally terse and conventional, but in 
a copy of Six French Poets (1916), she 
wrote: "Carl Sandburg, With sincere 
friendship and admiration"; and in her 
gift copy of her biography of John Keats 
she said simply, "Carl, with love from 
Amy." Untermeyer sent a copy of These 
Times (1917), paradoxically dedicated to 
Robert Frost, with the remark: "For Carl 
Sandburg fellow poet, & what's far more 
important, fellow fighter." In 1919 Un-
termeyer inscribed a first edition of his 
Modern American Poetry, "for Carl, the 
worst correspondent in the Western 
World from Louis, the next worst." 
Another Untermeyer book, Including 
Horace (1919), a collection of satirical 
odes and parodies, reached Sandburg· 
with the note, "This new brash but cor-
dial impertinence." And in 1921 Unter-
meyer, sending a revised version of Mad-
ern American Poetry, announced it "with 

50 C 0 L LEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRA R IE'S 



a truck-load of-damn these Anglo-Saxon 
inhibitionsl~love." 

Percy MacKaye was more solemn in 
his greeting. Sending a copy of The 
Mystery of Hamlet, the dramatic tetral-
ogy about the Hamlet story before Shake-
speare's tragedy began, MacKaye wrote: 
"To Carl Sandburg in the friendship of 
poetry from Percy MacKaye" and auto-
graphed the book at the Players Club, in 
New York City, December 7, 1950. 

It is somewhat of an anticlimax to 
turn from such names to the multitude 
of poets who dispatched their little vol~ 
umes, timorously but hopefully, either to 
Chikaming Goat Farm, Harbert, Michi-
gan, or to Flat Rock, North Carolina. 
But their very number testifies to the 
perennial urge to express one's self in 
verse and also to Sandburg's fame. Vol-
umes came from England, France, Cuba, 
Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and ] a pan, 
as well as from most of the states of the 
Union. A nisei sent a book from his de-
tention camp in Wyoming, and a bank 
president mailed his from Pennsylvania~ 
The poets were housewives, invalids 
turning to literature for a pastime, high 
school teachers, students, journalists, pro-
fessional men. The majority of the books 
contain inscriptions of some sort, oc-
casionally laconic, more often fulsome, 
and although the sentiments vary the 
writers usually express one of three atti-
tudes. Most frequently they express their 
homage to Sandburg and affirm in some 
way their appreciation for his work. 
Again, they intimate that Sandburg has 
stimulated them to write their own verse 
so that they have incurred a special obli-
gation to him. Finally, and this is often 
the most obvious of the motives, they beg 
for some comment, some evaluation of 
their work-for praise from Sir Hubert 
is praise indeed. 

Thus Jean Catel sent a copy of Faux 
Sens, issued at Montpellier in 1927, with 
the inscription, "tres cordial hommage a 
Carl Sandburg grand poete, de son frere 
modeste." And Alain Bosquet, poet and 
anthologist, wrote during war time in 

JANUARY 1963 

a copy of his L'Image Impardonnable 
(1942), "Au grand poete Carl Sandburg, 
l'hommage sincere d 'un admirateur." 

From Iowa in 1936 Van Meter Ames 
sent a copy of his Out of I ow a. From San 
Francisco came Sara Bard Field's The 
Village Festival in 1920 with the com-
ment: "To Carl Sandburg-The gods 
bless him-for there is old wine in his 
new songs"; and from San Francisco also 
Melba Berry Bennett sent In Review, 
Poems (1946), with the note, "In memory 
of the delightful day we spent discussing 
poetry and goats!" Anne Kelledy Gilbert 
presented Sandburg with a copy of The 
Angel of the Battlefield (1928), from 
Washington, and an Episcopal minister 
from the Deep South, Charles Granville 
Hamilton, sent Mississippi I Love You 
(1941). The gift of Dr. Frederick Kett-

ner, Life and Spirit (1948), was described 
by its author as a "biosophical poem." In 
1932 . Edna Nyquist compiled Pioneer 
Life and Lore of McPherson County, 
Kansas, and in the note accompanying 
the book describes her motives in under-
taking the work. After receiving the book 
Sandburg made one of his rare marginal 
notations in such gift volumes: "I thank 
you Miss N, you done good ... CS." 

A rather long note from a professor of 
moral philosophy, A. H. Lindsay, dated 
December 24, 1929, at Greeley, Colorado, 
and inscribed in a privately published 
pamphlet entitled Aphrodite and Other 
Sonnets might well illustrate the dual 
motives of praising Sandburg and win-
ning some kind of personal recognition. 

Dear Mr Sanburg [sic]: 
I enclose with my compliments 

a copy of recent sonnets. I dare to send 
them knowing perhaps that there may 
not be any which would appeal to you. 
Yet, if there is one, or a line of one, 
which may appeal to you, I would be 
pleased. 

I have read your poetry and I enjoy it; 
but, I frankly confess I prefer your 
polished products to "free verse." Not that 
I do not appreciate the real poetry in 
your "Grass/' and "Chicago," "Cool Tombs," 

5i 



I do, but I like the "polish" 
better. The moderns, no doubt, would 
not agree. There are schools of poetry, 
as there are, in theology, and all 
are more or less dogmatists. 

I would appreciate your frank 
reaction to the contents of this copy. 

Yours sincerely, 
December 24th 1929 A. H. Lindsay. 

Since Sandburg scorned sonnets because 
of their restrictive form, and habitually 
used free verse, one suspects that the 
writer never received an answer. But one 
still wonders what in Mr. Lindsay's mind 
represented Sandburg's. "polish." 

Among Sandburg's books are several 
volumes with no inscriptions and, for 
obvious reason, without authorial signa-
tures. Two of them are by Adolph Hit-
ler, a translation of Mein Kampf and 
My New Order. A third is the second, or 
1856, Brooklyn edition of Walt Whit-
man's Leaves of Grass. 

Sandburg's interest in and indebted-
ness to Whitman are well known. As a 
young man he read the Good Gray Poet 
faithfully and frequently; Whitman was 
his lecture topic when he first began to 

Kaser Is New Editor of CRL 

v1s1t the small colleges of the Middle 
West and to talk about poetry; his own 
poetry from the very beginning reflects 
the loose rhythms, the colloquial diction, 
and the cumulative epithets of the nine.., 
teenth-century poet. Thus it is only nat-
ural that he would treasure an early 
edition of Leaves of Grass. Perhaps his 
most effusive tribute to Whitman is con-
tained in the introduction he wrote for 
the Modern Library edition of Whit-
man's poems in 1921. But the note that 
he penned in the 1856 Leaves of Grass 
is quite revealing. 

What a lusty, reckless one 
was this Young Walt! 

c.s. 
What an unaccountable one-

and how respectable time has 
now made him! 

In the second decade of this century 
Sandburg's own verse was often deemed 
lusty, reckless, and perhaps unaccount-
able. Today, in the 1960's, Sandburg is 
a revered man of letters. Time has made 
him, too, respectable. •• 

WITH the March 1963 issue, the editorship of College and Research Libraries re-
turns to Nashville, Tennessee, where it was begun by Dr. A. F. Kuhlman in 
1939. The new editor will be Dr. David Kaser, director of the Joint University 
libraries and professor of library science in Vanderbilt University, George Pea-
body College, and Scarritt College. Dr. Kaser has been on CRL's editorial board 
since last year, was on the editorial board of Library Resources and Technical 
Services from 1958 to 1962, and was editor of the Missouri Library Association 
Quarterly from 1958 to 1960. He has also edited The Cost Book of Carey & Lea, 
which is presently in the University of Pennsylvania Press. In addition to his 
editing, Dr. Kaser has authored three books and a score of articles which have 
appeared in library, bibliography, and history journals. 

52 

The new assistant editor will be John D. Batsel, assistant divinity librarian 
in the Joint University libraries. Mr. Batsel took his baccalaureate degree from 
Lambuth College, his M.A. in religion and his B.D. degree from Vanderbilt 
University and received his library training in the Peabody Library School. • • 

COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 

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