Sound Autograph Investments - 1930

I own a book "Word Shadows of the Great .. The Lure of Autograph Collecting" by Thomas F. Madigan." The year of publication is 1930.

The authors suggestions for building a collection that will combine the elements of lasting interest and sound investments":

1. John Adams
2. John Quincy Adams
3. John James Audubon
4. Salmon P. Chase
5. Henry Clay
6. Mark Twain
7. Grover Cleveland
8. Jefferson Davis
9. Thomas Edison
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson
11. David G. Farragut
12. Eugene Field (Poet)
13. Benjamin Franklin
14. Robert Fulton
15. Ulysses S. Grant
16. Horace Greeley
17. Nathaniel Greene (general)
18. Alexander Hamilton
19. John Hancock
20. Bret Harte (author)
21. Nathaniel Hawthorne
22. Patrick Henry
23. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Poet)
24. Washington Irving
25. Andrew Jackson
26. Stonewall Jackson
27. John Jay
28. Thomas Jefferson
29. Robert E. Lee
30. Abraham Lincoln
31. Henry W. Longfellow
32. James Russell Lowell (author, poet)
33. James Madison
34. Edward McDonald (composer)
35. John Marshall
36. James Monroe
37. Thomas Paine
38. Francis Parkman (historian)
39. Edgar Allen Poe
40. Theodore Roosevelt
41. William H. Seward (Sec of State),(Seward's Folly)
42. William T. Sherman
43. Edwin M. Stanton (Statesman)
44. Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin)
45. George Washington
46. Daniel Webster
47. James Whistler (the artist)
48. Walt Whitman
49. John Greenleaf Whittier (Poet)
50. Woodrow Wilson

Only Americans were included in the list. Madigan had a separate list for Europeans.

Seems we've lost our enthusiasm for many of the noted poets of that time. Likewise their favorite composers, authors, and historians.

Some of the president's lasting achievements and name recognition overcame their overabundant supply.