Sold – Magnificent Album of Charles P. Davis Publisher of “Current Events” and “My Weekly Reader”

Charles P. Davis was a reporter and editor who served on the School Committee in his hometown of Agawam, Mass. Being news-conscious, he asked the students in his daughter’s class who the president was. Only one besides his own daughter knew it was William McKinley. When this experience was repeated in other schools, Davis decided something must be done if the schools were to turn out good citizens. He founded Currents Events magazine in 1902, with the purpose of supplying students with a reliable, condensed account of news at a minimal cost. Soon My Weekly Reader was added as an additional publication. Eventually his magazines were in virtually every school in America and became institutions that lasted for generations.

Davis kept an autograph album which we obtained directly from his descendents. It contains about a hundred signatures, the best known of which follow. Some are signed within the book, others are tipped in: Henry W. Longfellow, who dates his entry July 22, 1870, and writes out a stanza of one of his poems – “The very tones in which we spoke, Had something strange I could but mark; The leaves of memory seemed to make, A mournful rustle in the dark.”; Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and Grover Cleveland (the latter two on White House cards); Vice President Henry Wilson; Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton; Union Generals U.S. Grant, Winfield Scott Hancock, William S. Rosecrans, Nathaniel Banks, and Benjamin Butler; Confederate President Jefferson Davis (with a piece of crepe he used in decorating his house) and Vice President Alexander Stephens; abolitionists Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips; authors Charles Dickens, Julia Ward Howe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Admiral R.E. Peary; celebrities and politicos P.T. Barnum, Thomas Nast, Brigham Young, Edward Everett, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, Tomaso Salvini, and Roscoe Conkling; educator Booker T. Washington; Queen Victoria (“The Queen” on Buckingham Palace notepaper); and Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau, with a printed invitation to Garfield’s funeral. A very interesting collection.