Logo books. He had the distinct privilege to publish abraham lincolns bestselling book. That of people do not know he wrote one. They had their famous debate. There were a couple of people from newspapers transcribing the debates, writing down shorthand and then a couple of days later, they would print it in newspapers. That way, people who did not attend could read about what happened. This is breaking news. Lets move on. Lincoln, after he lost the senate race, he worked hard to gather those newspaper transcript. He worked hard. There are at least nine himiving letters of heem gathering these newspaper transcripts. He cut them out and pasted them in a scrapbook. You can still see it today at the library of congress. He is making these tiny little edits in pencil. If one paragraph is not accurate, he is cutting it out and putting a different paragraph in its place. This book contained almost 1000 of his word. Almost as many as Stephen Douglas. Lincoln went to try to find a printer. This was not easy because lincoln was not someone who atminently was prominent the time. They brought the book out in 1860. It was in a normas bestseller. Copies. 50,000 if you adjusted by population, it is the equivalent of a bookselling. 5 million copies today. This book came out in time for lincoln to be helped to become the nominee of president. Voters would write lincoln letters about this. When they asked him what he thought about this issue, he said look at my book. This book was essential to circulating his ideas and legitimizing him as candidate. They would say here is the book from Stephen Douglas and abram lincoln. They could not even get his name right. There was a huge role in lifting him to the white house. That is what led him lincoln aftered the presidency. Lincoln said it was good to see you. He said it should be, after all, i am the one that helped you president. All that lincoln could do was smile. One of my favorite lincoln after he heard that the book would be published. He said this was the greatest complement i ever received, that somebody wants to publish my book. Tell me about the concept for the book. Craig is the untold story of president s and their books. One thing that is really fun and surprising is that this is a history that as long as American History itself. I talk about two different types of books, Campaign Books like lincolns and they use a book to help them run. Did i docy books, what in the white house, what did my enemies say and what do i say . Thatirst Campaign Book, comes from Thomas Jefferson. The first legacy book comes from john adams. This is a really deep history. It is a brandnew angle on the presidency. I started working on this book 10 years ago. I had to make a list of how many books there are even out there that fit into this rubric. There were a lot of them. What in your mind is the value of judging a president or presidency by his writing . Craig it reminds me of what history felt like not just to president s but regular people. Sometimes we forget about this because there is a lot of different media including Television Shows like the ones we are on. When lincoln is running for president , books and newspapers were the mass media. When you think about a book, helping somebody run for the white house, it also tells you something about what it was like to be alive as a president ial candidate or voter. Distinctly him and angle on these issues. It shows a humans side of the president. There is something about writing that if you try to put your thoughts or feelings into words, you have to slow down, think what am i afraid of . What am i scared of . What do i want . That is true of president s just like everyone else. I tried to go behind the scenes and really find the details. I felt like i was founding even our most wellknown president s how did this all gets started for you . Craig back into thousand eight, i was in graduate school at the time. 2008 back in 2008, i was in graduate school at yale. I was going to politicos website and clicking election year. It was an exciting election. Books were making a big difference. Barack obamas books were everywhere. Books weres everywhere. This was making an impact. This felt special and new but is it . What i found is that history is so much deeper than i expected. It goes way back. There are so many books that had a huge impact that lifted people to the white house. It gave them a chance to make a memorable case with their legacy. It took me 10 years because there was a lot of groundwork too late to even be able to write a book like this because there were not president s. Prescedents. If you like reading history books, this will tell you the history about yourself. What was Calvin Coolidges favorite bookstore . How did the Printing Press work when Abraham Ligon was president . Lincoln was president . Happened to the phd . Mom would like me to say that it is still in progress. When did you say that there was a book here . Craig it happened pretty quickly. I would go to really Good Research libraries and get in those card catalogs and look up John Quincy Adams by his last name. How many are there by him . Making netlist, it was astonishing how many were by them. Herbert hoover wrote a mining textbook. There were these really important books. I realize that abraham lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, ulysses s. Grant, there were so many examples of these books mattering. I started to realize that there was a story to tell here. You alluded to the history of Nonfiction Book publishing in america. Why do you tell that story . Craig that is what helps us realize how important these books have been. Even if you read a lot of a good biography about a lot of the president s, their books dont come up. They are not essential. Louder furs and historians have a lot of work to do. They are worried about biographers and historians have a lot of work to do. They are worried about the policy. Without that context, you cant realize how important these books are. I will give you an example from lincoln. When lincolns book came out, it was a huge issue, everybody wanted to know where the candidates stood. It was a bestseller because of Steam Powered engines. Trains were finally widely available. It was much easier to move a book from one city to another by train. Books are heavy. If you want somebody to deliver a book by mail, they are not going to do it because there is only so much room in the saddle. Then Steam Powered engines helped because of Printing Presses. Printing presses had been similar to what gutenberg had done. One person takes the arm and polls. Pulls. Started to get powered by steam engines. To know about the history of bookstores and books, i have a lot of material about that. I like books. I think it helps us appreciate how these books mattered in their own times. When did readily available reading glasses become a factor . Craig the 19th century as well. I like those small details because you dont think of them as a technology but oil lamps, reading glasses, does really matter. It is hard to huddle up next to a fireplace and read a book. The more light you have to read by, the better reader you can be. That make meotnote laugh. There is a pastor and a passage from one reader. He is such a fun character. He says i will only read ir fees for the next year. I love nonfiction. Biographies for the next year. I love nonfiction. He goes to the church and there is an oil lamp there. Lampastor knocks over the and there is a fire. There was a lot of chaos. He said why didnt we just stick with candles . Oil lamps, those are technologies just like smartphones. Everyone has the darn internet. Mentioned footnotes. Your book has about 60 pages of notes filled with stories like this. How did you do all of this research . Craig slowly. It took 10 years of work. A lot of the work was looking at the history of nonfiction publishing and figuring out how president ial campaigns work because there were really important shifts in how you can run for president. How did you support yourself . I lived in the midwest. That helps because the costs were low. Works. I was fortunate to get a generous book deal, that helped. We made it work. There were not a lot of travelers or fancy for travels or fancy splurges. I wanted my first book to be as good as i could possibly make it. What was the biggest aha moment . Your biggest discovery . Craig lincoln. Another came from candidate. The fact that people have this vague sense that john f. Kennedys was written by someone else. I looked at thousands of pages of documents and i try to summarize that and show just how little work kennedy did. Ofn i found this humans side how much kennedy cared about the book. He is a senator, he is a celebrity. Being an author, it did not seem to be on the front of his mind but he would write his letter editor letters and say i was at the airport and i did not see any copies of my book there, can we fix that . Noticedd a senator Something Like that . I think he cared about being an author. As a firsttime author, what was it like picking up the wall street journal and seeing a fullpage positive review of your book . Was the best book on the presidency in years. Craig i cried. To work on something for 10 years and then have it described in those terms and have the reviewer do a great job summarizing what is in the book, he love the publishing side, the president ial side. It meant the world to me. It meant a lot that i started my book tour and talked to regular baiters to readers to have them tell me about president s and their books. The fact that it took 10 years to get there makes it all the c8 sweeter. There could be more down the road. Before we dig into individual stories, i wanted to run through a quick fact. Which president wrote the most books . Craig Teddy Roosevelt. I dont know that i ever crunched the numbers specifically but it cant imagine anybody other than Teddy Roosevelt did it. It was well over 30. You have to define whether a pamphlet is a book or a collection of speeches. I feel confident it was Teddy Roosevelt. If he were here, he would be announcing that fact. Who was the most gifted president ial writer . Craig it was probably lincoln. Just in his style of his speeches and books. Evenn coolidge, maybe history fans dont have his presidency at the front of their mind. He was an exciting writer. I found a New York Times article where they said that Calvin Coolidge is the best literary president since lincoln. He wrote a thank you letter to that author because it to him. You talk about president ial rating as well. G as well. Craig for a lot of them, books helped make them president s today. Run a reagan or harry truman, it was their local libraries that gave them that boost. Ronald reagan or harry truman, it was their local libraries that gave them that boost. That is where they started getting ideas and thinking about history. Harry truman was the biggest lover of history. Ulysses s. Grant was one of the guest fiction readers. He read so many novels. He got demerits as a cadet at west point for spending too much time in the library. That made his book stunning. President trump often says that he does not have time to read many books. What other president s were not readers . Craig Lyndon Johnson was not much of a reader. His wife would joke that he had not read a book since he was in college in texas. But iure that is not true dont think reading a book is the most important thing you can do as president. It is understandable that they are busy and they have a lot going on. But i value books and reading books on the way to the white house or taking some time to read can be a useful way to step back from all the excitement and news happening around them. Johnson and trump are two good examples. You mentioned a legacy books and Campaign Books as the two types. James buchanan wrote a legacy book. How did that help him craig since . Craig it did not help them dr. Donavan help him since how did that help him since . Craig it did not help him. Nothing was going to help him. He was not a good president. He decided that he wanted to write a book. He tried to recruit some friends and say i have all of my letters and papers, why dont you come write this book defending me . He did not get any takers so he said i have to do this myself. It is a book written in the third person. Writing an autobiography like running for president has changed a lot over the course of American History. Because buchanan did not want to appear too arrogant, he wrote in the third person. James buchanan is writing mr. Buchanan did this and that. There will be a little bit of writing and then a long document. The best writer in the world, i am not sure it could have saved him. The New York Times ran a review after the book came out that said buchanan did not wait for his enemies to write a book, he wrote a book himself and to attack you need him is right there in the book. Buchanan eventually told his friends to stop sending him reviews. Bill clinton talked about the importance of writing an autobiography or memoir. Lets look. I concluded from doing this book is that everyone who is fortunate enough to live to be pointuld sit down at some and write the story of his or her life even if it is just for yourelf, your children, families. It is important what you remember, how you remember, what you forget. It is important to come to terms with the life that you lived and thick about how you wish to spend whatever years are remaining. Everybody talks about how terrible book writing is. I enjoyed it. Think about president s. What does the whole genre of president ial memoirs due to the memoirs do to that presidency . Craig when president s write about their childhoods, those passages are the only place that scholars can get that information. Memoirs, theres is a wonderful story about his Favorite High School history teacher. You will find that in every truman biography and that comes right from truman himself. The books are very valuable for those early formative years. Valuable by the time they get to the time of real political power. That is when the president s tell their own version and use a little spin. That is when scholars have to sift and evaluate what the president said happened. But i think there is value in seeing how somebody spins. If you see how they view themselves, you can try to understand what they were trying to accomplish at times. When i was running my own book, that is when i tried to take readers behind the scenes. I can give you a good example from president clintons book. It is a very proclinton book. Instead of running through all of the points he made in my life, i tell the stories of how they worked on the book. He wrote the book. He was late on the book. He was a procrastinator. They got this book with millions of dollars writing on it. His editor came and slept on his catch couch to make sure that he did it. Made the deadline. I think those stories can be as important as the book itself. When did ghostwriters become part of the picture . How should we understand the ifsidents personality someone else is running his words . Craig it is a good question. Writing his words. Craig it is a good question. There are lesser president s who did the work themselves. I would push back against the idea that a ghostwritten book is automatically inauthentic or automatically up or book. I just dont think that is true. If we want to talk about the history of ghost writing in america, we have to start with George Washingtons farewell address. When it came to the time of the writing, washington got help. It was James Madison and Alexander Hamilton who helped put his ideas into words. They were his ideas. They landed with such impact because they had washingtons name attached. He was very involved in the process. He said this is the style i once, i want. Speech. Shingtons bookt go is this a good is this goat is this book ghostwritten or not, i go is this a good book or not . This is from 1957. Mike wheless talking to drew talking towallace drew pearson. Kennedyste that father, Joseph Kennedy is spending a fortune on a publicity machine to make jacks name wellknown. No candidate in history has had so much money spent on a Public Relations advanced build up. Jack kennedy is a personable fellow but he is not as good as that Public Relations campaign makes him out to be. He is the only man in history prizen a nobel peace on a book that was ghostwritten for him. Thisre people debating concept at the time after he won the Pulitzer Prize . Craig the Pulitzer Prize was the turning point. That is important to understand in the history of the book and in terms of understanding kennedys psychology. The book comes out in 1956. Over the course of that year, it is a hit. It is on the New York Times best sellers list for weeks and weeks. It elevates kennedy from being a senator from new england to being a national figure. In 1956, kennedy very nearly gets the Vice President ial nomination. That is a big surprise. Kennedy had a meeting with harry truman. He was an expresident but he was in the party infrastructure. Trumans at the at hotel suite. When kennedy comes out, they ask him what they talked about and he says my book. I the story stops there, think it is a happy story. Kennedy had the book written by someone else and we can talk about the Details Behind that. There is good ghost writing and dad ghost writing. This is an is ample of good ghost writing and bad ghost writing. Good ghostexample of writing. When i was working at the president ial library kennedy president ial libra