Last spring, I did an item about two Civil War histories with the same cover image, an engraving called First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation (below). We recently heard from William Marvel, who wrote Mr. Lincolon Goes to War, the second of the two books to appear in stores, and he confirmed my initial hunch that using the same art as Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s Team of Rivals was entirely accidental. “For what it’s worth, I had long since seen the jacket design of Mr. Lincoln Goes to War by the time I encountered my first bookstore copy of Ms. Goodwin’s tome,” Marvel reports. “Perhaps I keep my head down too long while working on my own books, but my initial reaction was a proprietary double-take.”
As I pointed out in the original item, though, if you’re going to write about Lincoln and his advisers, this engraving is a natural choice. Marvel agrees: He added that he’s using the engraving again as an interior illustration for the sequel, tentatively titled The Arms of Abraham, which he just delivered to Houghton Mifflin (which explains why he’s only finding out about our item). And now that he’s written about the first two years of the war, I asked, could two more volumes be far behind? He confirmed that he’s been researching volume three on spec, although he’s having trouble deciding what to call it: “Every mellifluous and pertinent title I’ve thought of so far has already been taken.”
