Team of Rivals

"With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember.  'When he came across a passage that Struck him,' his stepmother recalled, 'he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,' and 'when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.'  The once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized.  Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used."  (Lincoln)  (52)