Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, The. 1928-36.
Inscribed to Eleanor Roosevelt by FDR
Roosevelt, Franklin D., Introduction and Notes. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Edited by Samuel I. Rosenman, with a special Introduction and Explanatory Notes by President Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 1938.
5 vols., large 8vo.; full gray morocco stamped in gilt; top edges gilt.
First edition of the first five volumes of FDR’s monumental “collected” public papers, printing material generated during his first term as Governor of New York up through the 1936 election. Deluxe issue, 500 copies specially bound for presentation; copies of the trade issue were bound in blue buckram and sent out into the world in white and blue dust jackets.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper of volume four: For Anna Eleanor Roosevelt / with ever so much love from / Franklin D. Roosevelt. / Christmas, 1938.
FDR’s contribution to the Public Papers was significant. According to Fred B. Adams, FDR’s cousin and bibliographer (and long-time Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library), the President’s introductions and running commentaries helped bind the “material into an integrated whole,” thus creating “one of the most interesting, authoritative, and historically valuable works of its kind ever published.” It should be noted that no other President ever undertook such an exhaustive publication project while in office. It is also necessary to note, however, that the project was, commercially, a non-starter, to the extent that Random House declined the opportunity to publish a sequel, leaving the field to Macmillan which published four additional volumes in 1941, in a far less ambitious press run.
Ever the collector and book-maker, Roosevelt found rare collaborators in Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, his White House legal counselor who compiled and collated the material, and Joseph Blumenthal, the director of The Spiral Press. “I want to tell you how much I like the books,” FDR congratulated Rosenman upon the publication of the Random House edition, hoping that the “exceptionally good” reviews “would be some slight compensation for the months of drudgery which the editing entailed.”
This is only the third potently inscribed set of Public Papers we have handled: the others are the set FDR inscribed to Blumenthal (“A-1 Designer”) and the President’s own set, docketed by him in one of the Macmillan volumes, both from the collection of Donald S. Carmichael.
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