Lincoln Legal Briefs

              A Quarterly Newsletter of The Lincoln Legal Papers
A Documentary History of the Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, 1836-1861
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April — June 2006 Number 78
NHPRC Awards Grant and Subvention
In May, the National Historical Publications and
Records Commission (NHPRC) awarded the
Lincoln Legal Papers a grant of $80,746 for the fiscal
year beginning July 1, 2006. This grant is the
NHPRC’s seventeenth consecutive annual award to
the project and will be the final grant to support work
on the Lincoln Legal Papers, now Series I of the
Papers of Abraham Lincoln. This final grant will
support the
salary of one
a s s i s t a n t
editor and
part of the
Progress on the Manuscript
salary of another assistant editor, as the editorial staff
completes the final proofreading of the document
transcriptions from page proofs and reviews the index
for completeness and accuracy.
At the same May meeting, the NHPRC also
awarded the University of Virginia Press a subvention
grant of $40,000 for The Papers of Abraham Lincoln:
Legal Documents and Cases. The grant is the
maximum award of $10,000 per volume for the four
volumes to be published simultaneously in the fall
of 2007. The University of Virginia Press will use
this subvention to defray part of the costs of preparing
the manuscript and producing the printed volumes.
The Lincoln Legal Papers submitted its 3,200-
page manuscript to the University of Virginia
Press in the fall of 2005. However, work did not end
with the submission of the manuscript. At this point,
several important tasks are still in progress, and
others remain to be completed.
The press has completed
copyediting work on two volumes and
continues to work on the third volume.
This work has gone quite smoothly, and
the copyeditor, Ellen Barber, has done an
excellent job of maintaining consistency
and accuracy in editorial text and in
footnotes. The copyeditor has completed
her review of two volumes and is at work
on the third and fourth volumes. The
Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal
Documents and Cases remains on schedule for
publication in 2007.
After the press has completed a copyedited
volume and the project has reviewed it, the
manuscript is then ready for design work. The press
will prepare page proofs, which will be sent to the
project after all copyediting is completed. As with
the copyedited manuscript, the project will receive
page proofs volume by volume. At that point, staff
editors will re-proof the approximately
740 documents in the manuscript. While
this task will be time consuming, it is an
extremely important safeguard to ensure
the accuracy of the document
transcriptions.
When the page proofs arrive, a
professional indexer will prepare the
single index for the four volumes. Project
editors will carefully review the indexer’s
work for accuracy and thoroughness,
especially with complex legal terms and
actions. When the index is complete and reviewed,
the project staff will forward it to the press for
typesetting.