Recent Acquisitions in Americana from the William Reese Company

Next we have a copy of Ernest Lindley's Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy, with a particularly desirable inscription and association. This biography was published in 1931, while Roosevelt was still Governor of New York. FDR has inscribed the copy, “For my very dear children, James & Betsy, from their devoted Pa. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Christmas 1931.” Betsy was the first of James Roosevelt's four wives. Item 161. $5,000.

Here is another presidential inscription. The book is Profiles in Courage, future President John F. Kennedy's biography of some courageous people, published in 1956. Kennedy has inscribed it “To my former boss Louis Ruppel – with warmest regards, John Kennedy.” Kennedy worked briefly under Ruppel as a journalist in the period between leaving the Navy during the Second World War and being elected to Congress in 1946. Item 102. $7,500.

Item 108 includes two cabinet card photographs and a broadsheet program for Miss Olof Krarer, “The Little Equimaux Lady.” Little Miss Olof, and she was little indeed, was a dwarf from Iceland. She immigrated to America, and after working menial domestic jobs found she could do much better performing with a traveling circus. She was a sideshow attraction. However, she found in the off-season she could achieve even greater success as a lecturer. Although she was Icelandic, people assumed she was an Eskimo, so she began describing herself as an Eskimo from Greenland, a place she had never been. She then would lecture on the life and culture of Greenland Eskimos. It was all very interesting, but totally fake. Not knowing anything about Eskimo culture, she simply made it up. She claimed that Eskimos were born as white as Europeans, but that their mothers covered them with grease and they never washed throughout their lives. Men had to steal their wives from their parents' igloos, and if caught, the parents would kill them. Amazingly, no one ever questioned her, despite giving some 2,500 lectures. The broadside here offered was for an 1890 appearance at the Presbyterian Church in Richland, Michigan, but she would work her way up to giving heavily attended lectures at universities. Among those fooled by her act was perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (who was not “fooled” by Darwin) and the noted arctic explorer, Robert Peary. $1,500.