This folder contains correspondence and other documents relating to books sent to Edison or ordered by him. Among the items for 1919 are letters pertaining to books on the recent war, Arctic exploration, music, science, technology, economics, nutrition, and heredity. There is also a list of books ordered from Brentano's for delivery to Edison's winter residence at Fort Myers, Florida. At the end of the folder is an undated catalog from The Scribner Bookstore with titles for purchase circled, presumably by Edison. Two of the circled books are by Theodore Roosevelt, who died in 1919. The correspondents include Swedish industrialist and future International Olympic Committee president J. Sigfried Edstrom, Los Angeles businessman Harry M. Haldeman, Edison's brother-in-law Halbert K. Hitchcock, Westinghouse engineer and former Naval Consulting Board member Benjamin G. Lamme, Gaelic music vendor Charles S. Pratt, Charles E. Speirs of D. Van Nostrand Co., and Samuel W. Stratton of the U.S. Bureau of Standards.
Approximately 25 percent of the documents have been selected. The unselected items include solicitations, printed circulars, and letters of transmittal for unsolicited volumes; routine correspondence about subscriptions, including Edison's orders for the New York Times, New York Tribune, and New York World at Fort Myers; and documents pertaining to printed materials ordered by employees of the West Orange laboratory. Courtesy of Thomas Edison National Historical Park.