The New York Public Library’s grand research library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street is home to Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, Charles Dickens’s desk chair and the original Winnie-the-Pooh.
But one evening last week, a crowd in one of the library’s elegant public rooms was milling around a goofier treasure: an Abraham Lincoln-themed pie safe.
The safe — a large cabinet made to store pies, inlaid with decorative punched-tin panels celebrating the president — was probably created for one of his campaigns.
It was on view at a memorial for Jonathan Mann, a collector whose trove of rare letters, photographs, banners, ballots, ribbons, campaign songbooks and other sundry bits of Lincolniana is being acquired by the library.
Persons:
Charles Dickens’s, Abraham Lincoln, —, Jonathan Mann
Organizations:
New York Public, Fifth
Locations:
Virginia