The New York Public Library’s grand analysis library at Fifth Avenue and forty second Street is house to Virginia Woolf’s strolling stick, Charles Dickens’s table chair and the authentic Winnie-the-Pooh.
But one night remaining week, a crowd in one among the library’s chic public rooms was once milling round a goofier treasure: an Abraham Lincoln-themed pie protected.
The protected — a big cupboard made to retailer pies, inlaid with ornamental punched-tin panels celebrating the president — was once almost certainly created for one among his campaigns. It was once on view at a memorial for Jonathan Mann, a collector whose trove of uncommon letters, pictures, banners, ballots, ribbons, marketing campaign songbooks and different sundry bits of Lincolniana is being obtained through the library.
“There are all these individual gems,” Julie Golia, the library’s affiliate director of manuscripts, archives and uncommon books stated at the match, which drew about 200 pals, circle of relatives, creditors and figures from the public sale global. “But they tell a story together.”
Mann died last August, at the age of 61, after struggling a head damage all the way through a random assault through a disturbed stranger whilst on a daylight stroll throughout the Manhattan Bridge. Two weeks later, when he was once improving at a chum’s area, he suffered a deadly aneurysm.
The news despatched the close-knit global of Lincoln creditors reeling. Last fall, the circle of relatives labored with that pal, James Olinkiewicz, himself a collector of subject matter with regards to Buffalo Bill Cody, to discover a house for Mann’s holdings.
“Jonathan had always said to us, ‘If anything happens to me, don’t let the vultures pick my collection apart,’” Olinkiewicz stated.
After making an allowance for a number of establishments, they went with the New York Public Library, partly as a result of its dedication to public get right of entry to and digitization.
“We felt it would get the collection out to more people,” Olinkiewicz stated. And now, at the library, “it will live forever.”
Brent Reidy, the library’s director of analysis libraries, referred to as Mann’s trove, which is being obtained completely through donation, “rich and all-encompassing.”
“Some collections are very focused,” he stated. “But he had pretty broad taste when it came to anything relating to Lincoln.”
Mann were given the gathering computer virus at an early age, after his father confirmed him a number of outdated Twentieth-century marketing campaign buttons. After graduating from Vassar, he moved to New York City, the place he were given an M.B.A. at New York University and labored for a time in finance.
He later changed into a trade ethics guide, operating in a half-empty federal place of job construction, the place, pals recalled, he one way or the other commandeered further workplaces to stash his rising number of Lincolniana.
In 2009, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s delivery, Mann arranged “Abraham Lincoln in New York,” an exhibition at Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan, that includes many little-seen artifacts drawn in large part from personal collections. (A television clip displays him wowing Martha Stewart with tales about Lincoln’s canine, and a possibility to the touch the keys to his Springfield regulation place of job and Mary Todd Lincoln’s mourning veil.)
Mann’s different hard work of affection was once The Rail Splitter, a magazine for Lincoln lovers that he based in 1995 with Donald Ackerman, who stays editor in leader. Now a web site, it provides articles, e-book evaluations, bulletins and gossipy “splinters,” geared to the explicit pursuits of creditors, whose dating with historians incessantly comes to quite a few mutual side-eye.
“Simply put, we offer in this forum exactly what WE want to read,” the founders declared. “New finds. Details on items in the market. What something sold for in an auction. Who are the players? And how do we know if something is a fake?”
The neighborhood, it persevered, “has no borders but enjoys the commonality of a shared passion: the love of Lincoln, the love of American history.”
During the memorial, speeches through family and friends integrated little communicate of Honest Abe however quite a few tributes to Mann’s wit, intelligence, prankish spirit and love of New York City.
More than one speaker recalled five-block walks that took two hours, due to his dependancy of preventing to puppy each and every canine, inquire after each and every neighbor, check up on each and every Chinese menu.
One former assistant described how, after an actual property corporate attempted to logo his community as “NoPeSta” (as in, North of Penn Station), he shaped a fictional native ancient affiliation and began bombarding it with calls from “members,” the usage of other voices.
During the reception, Scott Russo, a contract e-book dressmaker and self-described fellow “crazy collector,” recalled the first time he encountered Mann, at the outdated Chelsea flea marketplace.
“There was this strange man who was berating two dealers I know very humorously,” he recalled. “He just had me in stitches. We became friends after that immediately.”
Russo additionally recalled Mann’s memorabilia-crammed loft on West thirty seventh Street, the place the well-known 1860 broadside through The Charleston Mercury with the headline “The Union Is Dissolved!” hung in the kitchen, “like it was a Thomas Kinkade or something.”
In the bed room, a big framed merchandise hid a “secret door,” which opened right into a room the place a lot of his assortment was once saved in grey acid-free containers, stacked smartly on steel cabinets. “It was immaculate,” Russo stated.
At the memorial, a sampling from the assortment was once arrayed in show instances, the place visitors (many dressed in Victorian-style elastic mourning bands on their sleeves, with a button that includes Mann’s {photograph}) may just ogle them. There have been handwritten letters through Lincoln and colleagues, in addition to a beneficiant sampling of marketing campaign tickets and ribbons, together with some revealed with photographic pictures.
Not on view: a strand of Lincoln’s hair, which Mann obtained from John Reznikoff, a number one purveyor of presidential hair. But there have been rarities like a smartly folded oilcloth cape as soon as worn through a member of the Wide-Awakes, a Republican political membership for younger citizens shaped in 1860, recognized for his or her dramatic torchlit nocturnal rallies. The capes, Golia defined, secure their garments from dripping lamp oil.
One {photograph} confirmed a gaggle of Wide-Awakes — younger males in glossy capes and matching caps, posing with their torches. But she additionally famous a ribbon that includes a portrait of Lincoln, below the phrases “Wide-Awake Girls.”
There have been some feminine Wide-Awake chapters. But who have been those “girls,” Golia requested? “There are so many great research questions here.”