The Abraham Lincoln Joke Book by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, 1965.

I love joke books on oddly specific topics! This one is a little bittersweet because it was published 100 years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, but the book isn’t about that. Instead, it’s a fun celebration of some funny stories about Lincoln and some of his favorite jokes.

The jokes are mostly in story form, and many of them are stories about incidents from Lincoln’s own life. Some of them are stories about his youth, like the time he helped a classmate secretly during a spelling bee and the time he played a prank on his stepmother by holding some younger boys upside down so they could walk across the ceiling of the house, leaving muddy footprints.

Not all of the stories in the book are true tales about Lincoln. The book admits that some of them are “tall tales” that other people told about him. Many of them were jokes that people told about Lincoln’s height because that was one of the first things that people noticed about him. It was all the more notable when he was standing next to his wife because he was especially tall and she was especially short.

The end of the book discusses how Lincoln would often use jokes and stories to make a point in a conversation or soften the blow of criticism. As President, he liked to read joke books or humorous stories to cheer himself up during stressful times. He is quoted as saying, “I laugh because I must not cry.” The book ends with a timeline of events in Lincoln’s life.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).