Chief Bookmen

What is a U.S. President apt to read in his leisure time? In a slim new volume called Three Presidents and Their Books (University of Illinois; $2.50), a historian, a librarian and an editor answer for a distinguished trio.

Lifelong Sermon. Of the trio (Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt), Jefferson was the only scholar. He built up three separate libraries for himself in his lifetime, and one of them (6,000 volumes) became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. "He loved books," says Professor Arthur Bestor of the University of Illionois. "He chose editions with discrimination ... he was careful of the physical condition of his volumes. But his ultimate purpose was not to display his library but to live with it and to make its volumes work for him and for others."

To make books work as they should, Jefferson preached a lifelong sermon against censorship. "Subject opinion to coercion," he wrote, "[and] whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons." Once, he took up his pen in the defense of a Philadelphia bookseller who was dragged into court for selling a scientific treatise deemed irreligious. "I am really mortified," said Jefferson, "that in the United States of America . . . the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate." The lesson that Collector Jefferson handed down: "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Self-Made Man. Lincoln, says David C. Mearns of the Library of Congress, was another sort of reader. Since he had less than one year's formal schooling, he learned on his own. Legend has it that he walked eight miles for a copy of Kirkham's English Grammar. He supposedly taught himself arithmetic from books on surveying, law from Blackstone. "He read hard books," wrote his first law partner, John T. Stuart. "Lincoln was a schollar [sic] from 1835-- rather a hard student to 1845 -- he was an educated man in 1860 -- more than is generally known."

Oddly enough, he virtually had no library of his own. He read Plato, Mill and Tom Paine, knew most of Burns by heart, and could quote extensively from Shakespeare and the Bible. Yet his gift editions of Gibbon and Channing showed no sign of ever having been opened, and he thought that most biographies merely "commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth." The fact is, said his old law partner, William Herndon, "Mr. Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America." Even so he became the greatest proof in history that America is, as he said, the land where everyman can make himself."

Old Role. According to North Carolina Editor Jonathan Daniels, once his press secretary, Franklin Roosevelt in his reading habits was a mixture of Jefferson and Lincoln. He was a collector like Jefferson, but like Lincoln, he rarely bothered with anything that did not interest him. At 15, he could still not spell De Quincey. But at Harvard, he was librarian for both the Hasty Pudding and the Fly Club, was already picking up "a very nice old edition of Smollett" and "the best possible set of Morte d'Arthur." As President, he liked to quote, from Bryce, dredge up "a very nice thing" from Livy. But if he had delusions about his own literary grandeur, he nevertheless played to the hilt one traditional, but little noted, role of the President. Says Daniels: "There is a feeling . . . that somehow the President ought to be also the leader and embodiment of a kind of national great-books program. The simple fact is that already by public demand the institution of the presidency includes its occupant's function as chief bookman of the Republic."

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