An evening with an old pamphlet

 I was sorting boxes of old books and photographs from the family home place when I came across my name on a pamphlet. It was “The Gettysburg Speech and other Papers by Abraham Lincoln,” No. 32 in the Riverside Literature Series.

It wasn’t mine. The Heber Taylor on the flyleaf was my grandfather, Heber Taylor I, who died of tuberculosis on Nov. 1, 1931. He was 36. My father, Heber Taylor II, was 7. That death 90 years ago, just as the Depression was setting in, is a landmark in my family’s history.

The pamphlet was first published in 1886, back before the speech at Gettysburg became the “address.” My copy is not a first edition and has a copyright date of 1899 in it. The price was 15 cents.

I have more than one interest in this little treasure.

First, my grandfather, a Tennessee farmer who lived through the heart of Jim Crow, was reading Lincoln. Like all old white men who grew up in the South, I have had to think about the culture I absorbed. It’s been a painful reckoning. It’s a small, quiet comfort that my grandfather was reading the work of a man who had done his utmost to save the Union, rather than destroy it.

Second, I love pamphlets. I love them because I love short things, things I can read in an evening. And so, on a recent evening, when I could have been watching some sitcoms or police dramas, I thought about Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” I thought about James Russell Lowell’s essay on Lincoln. And I thought about Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley and his short speech at a cemetery.

It was an evening well spent.