A Lincoln Trove Lands at the Library (Pie Safe Included)

The New York Public Library’s grand research library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street is home to Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, Charles Dickens’s desk chair and the original Winnie-the-Pooh.

But one evening last week, a crowd in one of the library’s elegant public rooms was milling around a goofier treasure: an Abraham Lincoln-themed pie safe.

The safe — a large cabinet made to store pies, inlaid with decorative punched-tin panels celebrating the president — was probably created for one of his campaigns. It was on view at a memorial for Jonathan Mann, a collector whose trove of rare letters, photographs, banners, ballots, ribbons, campaign songbooks and other sundry bits of Lincolniana is being acquired by the library.

“There are all these individual gems,” Julie Golia, the library’s associate director of manuscripts, archives and rare books said at the event, which drew about 200 friends, family, collectors and figures from the auction world. “But they tell a story together.”