He had the distinct privilege of being the person to publish Abraham Lincolns bestselling book. Guess i should back up a little bit because people dont know that Abraham Lincoln wrote a bestselling book. When lincoln ran for senate and lost to stephen douglas, they had their famous debate. During the debate, there were always a couple of people from newspapers who were transcribing by shorthand and the next day or couple of days later they would be printed newspapers of those who did not attend could read about what happened. News, but lincoln, after he also senate race, work very hard to gather those newspaper transcripts, and i mean worked very hard. There have been nine surviving letters, and he cut them out column by column and pasted them in a scrapbook. You can still see the scrapbook today in the library of congress. Taken a tiny edison pencil, if one paragraph isnt quite accurate, he is cutting it out and putting a different paragraph in its place. Contains 100,000 of lincolns words. It was the most perfect version in 1858. The lincoln went and tried to find a printer. It wasnt easy because lincoln was not a prominent picture at this point. They brought the book out in 1860. It was an enormous bestseller, sold 50,000 copies, which is a big number at any time. If you adjusted by population, its the equivalent of a bookselling i have moving copies today. The book came out in time to help lincoln become the republican nominee for president and then became more popular when he actually ran for president. Letters,uld write him and he would say just look at my book. The book was essential to circulating his ideas and to legitimizing him as a candidate. When the first reviews came out, people would say things like here is a book by Abraham Lincoln and douglas. People started to learn his ideas and it played a huge role in lifting him to the white house. He ended up visiting lincoln after he won the presidency and when he walked into the room to meet with lincoln, he said, lincoln said, its good to see you. He said it should be, because im the person that made you president. All lincoln could do was smile. Said this is the greatest compliment i have ever seen, if someone wants to publish my book. Story, tellust one me about the concept of the book. One thing thats really fun and surprising, its as long as American History itself. I talk about two different kinds of books in the book. Books whichgacy after the white house someone enemiesbout what did my say and what do i say. As an example of how all this history is, the First Campaign book comes from Thomas Jefferson. This is just really deep history, a new angle on the president. I started working on this book 10 years ago by making a list. How many books are there even out there, and there were a lot . What in your mind is the value of judging a president or presidency by his writing . There are a couple of things. It reminds me of what history felt like not just to president s, but regular people. Sometimes we forget about this, because we live in an age where there are 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. It was a distinctly human angle on these issues. I also think it helps because it shows a human side of the president. It applies to writing. 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 it is true for the rest of us. Time and time again, i would look at president s taking their time. I tried to go behind the scenes and really find the details. I felt like i was finding even our most wellknown president s at their most human. Host before we dig into the research of your book, there is a Craig Fehrman story that is interesting. How did this all gets started for you . Craig it was back in 2008. I was in graduate school at the time. Host where was that . Craig i was in graduate school at yale. I was spending a lot of time going to politicos website and clicking election year. It was an exciting election. What i noticed was books were making a big difference. Barack obamas books were everywhere. John mccains books were everywhere. These books were really making an impact. I got curious and i thought, did this happen before . This felt special and new but is it . I started digging in and what i found is that history is so much deeper than i expected. As i mentioned, 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 to lay to even be able to write a book like this because there were not precedents. I also tried to do research on the cultural side. If you like reading history books, this will tell you the history about yourself. There is material about, what was Calvin Coolidges favorite bookstore . How did the Printing Press work when Abraham Lincoln was president . I think those kinds of quick little stories remind us about how American Culture works and how important books have been to our country. Host what happened to the phd . Craig my mom would like me to say that it is still in progress. I will defer to her it is still in progress. [laughter] host when did you say that there was a book here . Craig it happened pretty quickly. The 2008 election, i was curious but i did not start digging into it until 2009. 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 books are there by John Quincy Adams . Making that list, it was astonishing how many books there were. And how many strange books. Herbert hoover wrote a mining textbook. Who knew . Also, there were these really intimate and important books. I started to realize that Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, ulysses s. Grant, jefferson, adams, there were so many examples of these books really mattering. That is when i started to realize that there was a story to tell here. Host your book is also, and you alluded to this, the history of Nonfiction Book publishing in america. Why do you tell that part of the story . Craig that is what helps us realize how important these books have been. Even if you read a good biography about a lot of the president s i talk about, their books dont come up. There books are not central. Biographers and historians have a lot of work to do. They are worrying about the white house, policies, and legislative debate. My books are about the human side and the publishing side and running for office. 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 bestseller because people cared. Slavery was a huge issue, everybody wanted to know where the candidates stood. But it was also 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. Before there were trains, you had to move them by horseback or horse carriage, and 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 saddlebag. 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 pulls. In this period, Printing Presses started to get powered by steam engines. That made it faster to make books and cheaper. That made it easier for people to buy books. Those kinds of changes, first of all, they are fun. If you like books and you want 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. Host 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, those really matter because it is hard to huddle up next to a fireplace and read a book. The more light you have to read by, the more you can read and the better reader you can be. I have one footnote that make me laugh. There was a pastor from one a reader who lived in new york city. He is such a fun character. He decided, i am only going to read biographies for the next year. I love nonfiction. He goes to the church and there is an oil lamp there. The pastor knocks over the lamp and there is a fire. There was a lot of chaos. A lot of disaster. The pastor is freaking out. He said, why didnt we just stick with candles . Candles, oil lamps, those are technologies just like smartphones or anything else today. Host everyone who has ever had the darn internet expression is identifying with the candle in the oil lamp. You 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. [laughter] 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. Host how did you support yourself . Craig i lived in the midwest. That helps because the costs were low. My wife works. She is a very patient woman. She is actually a book editor. She is a wonderful editor as well. I was fortunate to get a generous book deal, that helped. We made it work. There were not a lot of travels or fancy splurges. That is because i was working on the book. I am glad i did. It was my first book and i wanted it to be as good as i could possibly make it. Host what was the biggest aha moment . Your biggest discovery . Craig sure, because i am from the midwest, my bias wants to say lincoln. We have talked a little bit about his book and the fact it was a bestseller. Another moment came from kennedy. The fact that people have this vague sense that john f. Kennedys book was written by someone else. I spent time at the kennedy president ial library looking at thousands of pages of documents. I try to summarize that and show just how little work kennedy did. Then i found this human side of how much kennedy cared about the book. He is a senator, he is a celebrity. Being an author you would not think would be on the front of his mind, but it was. When the book came out, he would write his editor letters and say, i was at the airport and i did not see any copies of my book there, can we fix that . Why would a senator notice Something Like that . I think kennedy cared about being an author and seeing that side of him was surprising to me. Host as a firsttime author, what was it like picking up the wall street journal and seeing a fullpage positive review of your book . With the conclusion author and chief ends up being one of the best books on the presidency that has appeared in years. Craig i cried. Ill be honest with you. 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 loved 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 readers to have them tell me their favorite stories about president s and their books. It has been a wonderful experience. The fact that it took 10 years to get there makes it all the sweeter. Host how many cities will you visit . Craig 13, i believe. There could be more down the road. Host before we dig into individual stories, i wanted to run through a couple of quick facts. 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. Host who was the most gifted president ial writer . Craig it was probably lincoln. Just in his style of his speeches and books. There are also some surprising president s. Calvin coolidge, maybe even history fans dont have his presidency at the front of their mind. He was such a talented writer. I found a New York Times article where they said that Calvin Coolidge, and this was during his presidency, Calvin Coolidge is the best literary president since lincoln. He wrote a thank you letter to that author because it mattered to him. Host you talk about president ial reading as well. Which among the president s were the most voracious readers . Craig for a lot of them, books helped make them president s today. They were dedicated readers. Somebody like Ronald Reagan or harry truman, it was their local libraries that gave them that boost. Their families were working class so they couldnt go out and acquire a lot of books but they had their libraries. That is where they started getting ideas and thinking about history. Harry truman was the biggest lover of history. In terms of reading. Ulysses s. Grant was one of the biggest fiction lovers. He read so many novels. He got demerits at west point as a cadet for spending too much time in the library. All that fiction reading helped make his president ial memoir a stunning book. Host on the converse side, 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. I am sure that is not true, but i 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. Host you mentioned legacy books and Campaign Books as the two types. James buchanan wrote a legacy book. How did that help him . Craig it did not help him. Nothing was going to help him. He was a terrible president. People realized it quickly. People in the north and south realized it. I think that is why he wrote the book. He realized history is not going to look kindly on me or the civil war. The groundwork for it was under my watch. 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 not a book that is very rewarding to read today. It is written in the third person. Writing an autobiography, like running for president , has changed a lot over the course of American History. I am sure we can talk about some of the reasons for that. 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. It grabs long chunks of documents from those papers. There will be a little bit of writing and then a long document. Even if he was 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 everything you need to attack him is right there in the book. Buchanan eventually told his friends to stop sending him reviews. I do not want to read anymore of this. Host we are going to listen to a few clips. The first one is a contemporary president , bill clinton, talked about the importance of writing an autobiography or memoir. Lets look. [video clip] mr. Clinton i concluded from doing this book that everyone who is fortunate enough to live to be 50 should sit down at some point and write the story of his or her life, even if it is just for yourself, your children, your 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 think about how you wish to spend whatever years are remaining. Everybody talks about how terrible book writing is. I enjoyed it. And i have written every word of this book. Host he is arguing that everyone should do it. When we think about president s, what does the whole genre of president ial memoirs do to that collection of history of that presidency . Where does it fit in how scholars judge . Craig have to take it in two parts. When president s write about their childhood, when they first fell in love with politics or thoughts about running for office, those passages are the only place that scholars can get that information. In Harry Trumans memoirs, there 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. They become less 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 versus what actually happened. But i would say there is value in seeing how somebody spins. If you see how they view themselves, you can try to understand what th