Herndon took no more steps toward writing [End Page 246] "the inner life of Mr L." until 1875, when an Asbury College student, Jesse W. Weik (1857–1930), wrote to him to ask for a Lincoln autograph. Herndon obliged, and the response turned into an ongoing correspondence. In 1882, Weik moved to Springfield as a Pension Bureau agent and proposed restarting Herndon's project with Weik as ghostwriter. Herndon still had his three bound volumes of interviews, letters, and depositions, which he supplemented in thirty-five long letters of personal Lincoln reminiscence to Weik between October 1885 and January 1886. From this, Weik spun out Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life in 1889. As with the Lamon Life, the critics were scandalized by what appeared as disloyal and unseemly revelations of Lincoln's shortcomings, and Robert Todd Lincoln—then the American minister to Great Britain—bought up and destroyed every copy shipped there. In fact, Herndon's Lincoln might have disappeared entirely when the publisher went bankrupt in September, 1889. Weik, however, came once again to the rescue and in 1891 negotiated a new contract with Charles Scribner's Sons. Robert Lincoln again interposed his influence and persuaded Scribner's to back out. But the resourceful Weik found yet another publisher in D. Appleton & Co., which brought out a second edition of Herndon's Lincoln, just after Herndon's death in March 1891. It certainly was, as the title proclaimed, Herndon's Lincoln. The book ends, for all practical purposes, with the end of the Lincoln-Herndon partnership and Lincoln's departure from Springfield for his inauguration in 1861. But not even Weik could squeeze into it all of Herndon's research materials; Weik would later go on to write a Lincoln book of his own, The Real Lincoln, utilizing much of the material left out of Herndon's Lincoln.