Books We Used to Research Presidential Campaign Posters

The Library of Congress has 34.5 million books, but the writers in the Publishing Office only used a select few sources from the Library's 838 miles of bookshelves.

In spite of the size of our book collection, the books we used from the Library's collections for the entries featured in Presidential Campaign Posters only occupied one small shelf in our conference room. Yet these books and the facts held within their pages helped all of our writers craft captions that were both fun and factual. Most importantly, the books helped us tell the story behind the posters and the election it commemorates.

Here are a few key sources that were on our shelf:

Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate. New York: The Free Press, 1991.

Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Emmett H. Buell, J. and Lee Sigelman, Attack Politics: Negativity in Presidential Campaigns Since 1960. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Donald R. Deskins, Jr., Hanes Walton, Jr., and Sherman Puckett, Presidential Elections, 1789-2008: County, State, and National Mapping of Election Data. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2010.