“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
—Winston Churchill
Some have led us into battle; others have guided nations and empires through their births, in their darkest hours, or to their greatest moments. And some have led by example, whether by persevering through adversity in the Antarctic or by quietly defying injustice on a Montgomery bus. Their courage has inspired us; their ideas have changed history.
Now it’s up to you to help pass on their legacies. Build a collection around the leaders who most inspire you. Our expert staff can help you to rediscover their courageous voices, captured in books and documents that will last for generations.
The items listed in our mini catalogue represent just a small selection of our offerings. Download our catalogue to begin building a valuable and enduring monument to history’s finest men and women: your own library.
“This mammoth work is a necessary part
In Profiles in Courage Kennedy looks at eight American senators, including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Sam Houston, whose lives provide a path through the challenges of political life and toward America’s future. Here is Kennedy’s tribute to those who best inspire faith in “the cause of principle… that is the basis of all human morality.” We are pleased to offer a rare inscribed copy of Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the scarce original dust jacket and housed in a custom clamshell. 
“One of these mornin’s you’s gonna rise up singin’.”
In 1934 Gershwin finally began work on the opera. When Porgy and Bess premiered in 1935, it was not successful, but it was controversial. Some questioned the use of African-American dialect and even Gershwin’s use of the opera form was criticized as being unconvincing and too “popular.” In the end, Gershwin and Heyward both lost money on the project. It was not until years after Gershwin’s death that the opera became popular with audiences, and it was decades before it finally received acceptance within the opera world. Today, Porgy and Bess represents the best that American opera has to offer.
Circumstances, indeed: in the intervening years the country plunged into the Great Depression, his wife Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and had to enter a sanitarium for long-term care, and Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism and the difficulty of ever surmounting his own reputation following the near-miraculous Gatsby. “The man who started the novel,” he remarked after publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934, “is not the man who finished it.” Reception was mixed and while the novel sold well for the Depression era, Fitzgerald had hoped for so much more.
The expensive undertaking almost ruined him and his publishers, but it is fortunate that he persevered: in 1865 fire ravaged the Smithsonian, destroying many of King’s original oil paintings.