Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - July - 2003 Issue
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt By Edmund Morris
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would resolve themselves over time. Born into a blue-blooded Republican family he would become a leading proponent of fairness for the working class. In time he would precipitate anti-trust actions against both the railroads and the oil companies. He could not be easily defined because he remained willing to adjust to new information and changing circumstances. Born a Brahman he became, if not an every man, someone that most people could identify with. He was committed to a thought process rather to specific ideas and this gave him the flexibility to change.
Building a book collection based on Theodore Roosevelt is a very interesting idea. In fact, there are many ways to build a collection directly or indirectly on him. Of course, one can collect all his many books. One can pursue first editions or even signed copies although you may need a mortgage to do it. On ABE a search of Theodore Roosevelt in the "author" field yields 3048 matches, the most expensive of which is $27,500. In fact, there are 85 items priced one thousand dollars and higher. But this also means there are more than 2,900 items that are less expensive if not cheap. The least expensive item is sixty cents. When I then put Theodore Roosevelt in the “title” field we get even more matches but the prices are lower. The most expensive item is $7,500 and the least expensive nineteen cents.
Of course it is also possible to simply use him as a bookend. Reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt gives you a sense of the world he was born into. It then becomes very interesting to develop a list of materials that illuminate the changing world that he inhabited, potentially followed by the world he remakes. A "keyword" search of the ÆD, covering material from before 1925, finds 428 Roosevelt records. Almost all of these records directly and indirectly relate to him. The high number of records on ABE suggests there are plenty of copies and many, many reprints. He is a large subject and can be collected at every level.
Here are a few other ways to build collections that relate to Theodore Roosevelt using these terms as "keyword" searches in the ÆD: Bad Lands (56), Spanish-American War (45), national park (216), national parks (19), Sagamore Hill (5) and rough riders (21). In the index in the back of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, there is a virtual road map to collecting in this and related fields with more than 1,000 searchable headings.
Not everything is going to be expensive. Recently I bought a large group of bibliographical material that contained an interesting piece of Roosevelt ephemera. It is a brochure for a new book just released (1905) by Charles Scribner’s Sons titled Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter.
