Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years -- One-Volume Edition

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954. Hardcover. Small 4to. Maroon cloth with gilt spine lettering. xiv, 762pp. Illustrations, pictorial endpapers. Very good. Faint edgewear (mainly at spine head/tail). A tight and nice first edition, sans jacket, of this hefty single volume revised abridgement of Sandburg's massive 6-volume Lincoln opus (1926 and 1939) -- but with choice autograph addition: Tipped to the inner flyleaf (facing half-title page) is a handsome unsigned Autograph Note pencilled in Sandburg's large, bold hand, 1p, 7" X 3", n.p., n.y. Reads in full: "Paul -- Do you have HC Whitney's big fancy brochure / 'The Lincoln Autographic Album'? I have / [Illinois governor Henry] Horner's copy, in case you don't have one, and / can send it on to you. You." [Closing verbatim.] Unsigned, of course, as this was a note to himself that Sandburg perhaps had an assistant type into a letter. The "Paul" to whom Sandburg writes would be Illinois historian and Lincoln scholar Paul M. Angle, one of the handful of close friends to whom he dedicated the one-volume edition of his Lincoln sextette and whose Lincoln studies are noted in the "Sources and Acknowledgments." Henry Clay Whitney (1831-1905) was a good friend of Lincoln's and colleague on the Illinois circuit best known for his 1892 memoir "Life on the Circuit with Lincoln." In 1891 he published a 102-page booklet titled "The Lincoln Autographic Album" containing facsimile signatures, illustrations and other odds and ends. An attractive and highly unusual unpublished note.