January 2011

We are pleased to announce that American Heritage Publishing Company is offering two companion volumes for this holiday season— The American Heritage Cookbooks . One is an old favorite, long out of print and greatly in demand, The American Heritage Cookbook —500 traditional recipes and 30 historic menus from every era of our history. Boxed with it in a special slipcase is a totally new volume, The American Heritage Book of Fish Cookery . Written by Alice Watson Houston, it includes recipes and clear instructions on how to prepare more than 100 varieties of native fish. Both books are richly illustrated. The boxed set—a 496-page feast—costs $26.00. If you’d like to send it as a Christmas gift, please call the following toll-free number: 800-228-5656 (in Nebraska, call 800-642-8777) but be sure to do so by December 12. For later deliveries, you may, of course, call anytime.

In “The Bohemian Club” (June/July, 1980), Richard Reinhardt’s sprightly treatment of one of our most exclusive fraternal organizations, the author noted that the club rented its first San Francisco headquarters in 1872 “from a local fraternity called the Jolly Corks, which long since has joined the dust of the Tontine, the Pickwick Club, and the Rinky Dinks.”

Thank you for not smoking ... It was called the “coffin nail,” the “little white slaver,” the “little white hearse plume"—and as early as 1923 you could be arrested for smoking it in public in some states. It was the cigarette, and beginning more than eighty years before the Surgeon General issued his warning against smoking in 1964, it was the target of a national crusade whose vehemence rivaled that of the Prohibitionists.

By chaos out of dream . . . Pulitzer prize - winning novelist and historian Wallace Stegner explores the exploration of America—from Columbus to John Wesley Powell, from the uses of myth to the continuing quest of a nation in search of its deepest meanings.

The foibles and furies of Parson Weems . . . What did the story of George Washington and the cherry tree really mean? Carry Wills offers a surprising answer.

Children’s toys are appealing for much the same reason that children’s drawings are appealing: they are strong, simple distillations of the adult world. Bright, crisp, and spirited, the best of them appeal to the child in every grownup. The examples here are from the superb collection of Bernard Barenholtz. Himself a successful toy manufacturer, Barenholtz was naturally drawn to the products of his nineteenthcentury counterparts; when he found himself getting up at 5:30 A.M. to make sure of getting a particularly desirable tin Santa Claus, he knew he was a confirmed collector. It was no small task. By 1880 America had more than 170 toy manufacturers, producing tin riverboats and steam locomotives, cast-iron acrobats and trotting horses, windup carrousels and wooden villages —a whole civilization in miniature. Barenholtz’s success in tracking down the relative few that have survived the ravages of play and time is reflected in the pictures on these pages, taken from his book American Antique Toys, 1830-1900 , co-authored by Inez McClintock and published this season by Harry N.

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, a handsome eightstory structure set in a wide plaza flanked by a long, low building which houses the LBJ School of Public Affairs, stands in the center of Austin. On the top floor, next to a replica of the White House Oval Office—as it looked when occupied by President Johnson—is Mrs. Johnson’s office. There, she talked about the library and the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Would you tell me about the library?

The proposal for Lyndon to leave his papers to the University of Texas at Austin came to us very early, I think within a month after Lyndon was inaugurated in '65. They proposed to build a building to house them. I didn’t any more know what a presidential library was—who does? But Lyndon sort of delegated that to me as he did a lot of things, and he said, “Okay, you learn a lot about it and you tell me.”

First-Person America The Treasure of the Concepcion The Face of Lincoln

Selected and edited by Ann Banks
Alfred A. Knopf
Photographs
320 pages, $13.95

The Federal Writers’ Project, operating under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration in the latter years of the Depression, is best known for its series of excellent—and still indispensable- guides to the states of the nation. What is not as well known is the fact that hundreds of the project’s researchers and writers—among them Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Richard Wright—were given the task of interviewing thousands of working Americans all over the country, recording their feelings, fears, experiences, and the rhythms of their language. The result was the largest body of first-person narratives ever collected in the United States. And for nearly forty years the material lay almost untouched and all but forgotten in ancient files.

by Peter Earle
Viking
Illustrations, maps
274 pages, $12.95

On October 31, 1641, the stormbattered Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion , flagship of the Spanish silver fleet, struck a reef off the coast of Hispaniola. She took to the bottom with her perhaps as much as 140 tons of silver. Of course, men immediately set out to recover the treasure, but despite all that greed, chicanery, and courage could accomplish, none had any luck until, nearly fifty years after the event, a resourceful Boston sea captain named William Phips decided to try. He got an astounding quarter of a million pounds and a knighthood for his pains.

Compiled and edited by James Mellon
Viking
Photographs
201 pages, $75.00

No face is better known to us than Lincoln’s, and so it might seem that this big volume—containing all 120 existing photographs of him, interspersed with quotations from his writings and from those who knew him best—would be a flossy redundancy, gotten up for the Christmas trade.

Instead, it is a triumph. Lincoln knew the value of publicity: he had his picture taken at least 136 times. Sixteen of those poses have long since vanished, and all but 29 of the rest exist only in imperfect form—as second-, or third-, or fourthgeneration copies, faded, retouched, or otherwise abused by time. It was Richard Mellon’s good, simple notion to track down and meticulously reproduce the finest example of each surviving portrait before it, too, disappears. The book is large (each page measures 113/8 by 14½ inches) and the painstaking printing, supervised by Professor Richard Benson of Yale, is superb.