News on Burlingame's Multi-volume Lincoln Bio

Special thanks to Andrew Wagenhoffer, who runs a fine blog called Civil War Books and Authors, for calling my attention to a new story in The Biographer’s Craft on Michael Burlingame.

For those of you unfamiliar with Burlingame’s work…get familiar with it! His 1997 offering The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln is magnificent, as are his many edited volumes. But for almost a decade now, we have heard rumors about a multi-volume Lincoln biography. It appears as if it will hit shelves next year!

The Johns Hopkins University Press plans to publish Abraham Lincoln: A Life as a two-volume set totaling a whopping 2,000 pages. The price is surprisingly reasonable at $75.

But this won’t be your standard biography:

In a nod to the age of cyberspace, Burlingame also obtained permission to create an unusual internet version of his book. Like a director's cut DVD, this version of the biography will include all the material left on the cutting floor. Especially valuable to researchers will be the longer version of the footnotes. And, like Wikipedia, the on-line version of the biography will be continuously updated and corrected.

To put it mildly, this is going to be an important book. I'll pass along more news when it becomes available.