Bound Book for 1864 Atlantic Monthly, entire year! (SOLD)

This is another nice item being offered, it is a bound volume of The Atlantic Monthly magazine for the year 1864. This hard cover book measures 9 1/4" x 6 1/4" x 2" and has 780 pages. The title page reads "The Atlantic Monthly / A magazine of / Literature, Art, and Politics. / Volume XIII / Boston: Ticknor and Fields...." The second page reads "Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864".

The Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857 at a famous meeting of the minds between Francis H. Underwood, who had the idea for the magazine as early as 1853, and literary giants such as James Russell Lowell (The Atlantic Monthly's first editor), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, along with a few other less notables. Besides these sponsors the fledgling magazine also had guarantees of contributions from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe and other writers of the period. At this founding meeting it was decided that all articles and stories in The Atlantic Monthly would be published anonymously.

Emerson had said "The names of contributors will be given out when the names are worth more than the articles", certainly an admirable sacrifice of ego. While founded on anti-slavery notions, The Atlantic Monthly rather preferred to provide escapist entertainment during the Civil War and thus did not allow the War itself to monopolize its pages. Still, the magazine did publish war reports from the front by Nathaniel Hawthorne and in the February 1862 issue, published Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," so it's not as though the young magazine ignored the war altogether.

Some of the articles in this book are Northern Invasions, Our Soldiers, The Peninsular Campaign, along with The Presidential Election. On the election, in part it reads "The 20th presidential election finds us not only at war, but engaged in a civil war of such magnitude that even the most martial nations of Europe are surprised at the numbers that take part in it, and at its cost". The stories in this rare book are amazing, a first hand account of the minds of the American people while their country was in such turmoil. This book shows its sign of use, but overall it still remains in nice condition and complete. An extremely difficult book to find.