21 February 2012

More history for the day

One of the privileges of living with Rico's ladyfriend is waking up to NPR, and this story was on the news recently, with this article from the Los Angeles Times:
It's Presidents Day, which through the years has become a celebration of George Washington, whose birthday was 22 February, Abraham Lincoln, who was born on 12 February, and other of our commanders in chief. Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.— where President Lincoln was shot and which continues to operate as a theater and is a National Historic Site— is celebrating, bookishly.

Ford's Theater is opening a new Center for Education and Leadership, and inside is a 34-foot tower of books. A tower of books about Abraham Lincoln.
That is an awful lot of Lincoln books.
The tower is eight feet in diameter and is more than three stories tall. There are seven thousand books in the tower, while fifteen thousand books are said to have been written about Lincoln. "It makes a real statement to anyone that this is an important guy and there was a whole lot written about him, and there continues to be a whole lot written about him," Paul Tetreault, director of Ford's Theatre, told NPR.
The only bummer about this extravagant display of Lincoln literary love is that it isn't made of books; the book tower is constructed of aluminum, imprinted with copies of book covers.
Rico says the original NPR broadcast noted that the only person with more books written about him than Lincoln was Jesus Christ; in this case, Number Two with a bullet is pretty good... (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

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