Books by John M. Taylor

This book chronicles the evolution of the Manuscript Society, a fifty-year-old organization of collectors and archivists, in the context of autograph collecting in general.

Why did Seward, front-runner for the 1860 GOP presidential nomination, lose his party's nod to the relatively unknown Lincoln, and why has he been so completely eclipsed by him since? Taylor depicts a politico whose manifold talents were often undermined by his own ambiguity (even Seward admitted that he "found myself an enigma to myself').