HEARTS of the CITY / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news : A Passion for the Past : Louise Taper’s dedication to collecting Lincoln memorabilia is giving the public an opportunity to see some rare treasures.

Any link between a tennis club in contemporary Beverly Hills and a Civil War military hospital on the East Coast may seem farfetched. But not for Louise Taper, one of the nation’s most successful and passionate collectors of Abraham Lincoln memorabilia.

Such a connection led the Beverly Hills resident to acquire a treasure: a pardon for a soldier that Lincoln signed directly on a gauze bandage during a hospital visit. “Let this boy be pardoned for any supposed desertion, and discharged from the service,” the 16th president wrote on May 28, 1864.

More than a century later, Taper and her husband, Barry, were able to see the bandage pardon because it belonged to someone whose attorney played tennis at their club. The lawyer, however, insisted the artifact was not for sale and rarely left the vault.

“I went crazy,” Louise Taper recalled. “I said that if the owner hadn’t looked at it in 25 years, then he didn’t care about it. And the public really needed to see it.”

Taper got her way, as she often does in the rarefied and expensive world of Lincolniana. She bought the bandage and later included it in a 1993-94 exhibition that proved to be the most popular ever at the Huntington Library in San Marino. The show reopened Monday at the Chicago Historical Society, marking the 187th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and giving his home state a taste of Louise Taper’s self-described obsession for material clues to Lincoln’s personality and tragic family history.

“It starts to take over your life,” Taper said. Among her acquisitions in the Chicago show are the gloves and handkerchief Lincoln carried to Ford’s Theatre on the night of his assassination there by John Wilkes Booth; bloodstains are still visible on the gloves.

The Tapers--the wealthy son and daughter-in-law of financier S. Mark Taper, namesake of a theater at Los Angeles County Music Center--even have bought a condominium in Springfield, Ill., to be close to other Lincoln experts.

“I imagine the Tapers are the only people in Beverly Hills who have a second home in Springfield,” said John Rhodehamel, the Huntington’s curator of American history and co-editor with Louise Taper of a new book of Booth’s writings. He described the Taper collection as the most comprehensive private one on Lincoln and his family.

Of the 200 items displayed in “The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America,” more than a third are loaned by the Tapers and the rest are from the Huntington and the Illinois State Historical Library. Several officials credit Louise Taper with the idea for the show and with smoothing complicated talks among participants.

But don’t expect any deep psychological revelations when Louise Taper answers the obvious question: Why Lincoln?

“I was just fascinated at how bright he was and that he had only a year and a half of actual schooling. I was just very impressed that someone could be so smart and did all the things he did because he put his mind to it. And his honesty, his integrity and, when he was president, how important it was to keep the country from dividing,” she replied from a Chicago hotel room where she was preparing for exhibition seminars.

Her most gratifying moments at the Huntington occurred when she watched schoolchildren tour the show, Taper said. She plans to do likewise during the yearlong Chicago exhibition. “I’d like them to come away from it with the idea that they could be president too,” Taper said. “You never know.”

The Taper artifacts include a beaver pelt stovepipe hat that Lincoln wore during the Civil War; a plaster life mask of Lincoln made two months before his murder; an 1824 page from Lincoln’s arithmetic homework book; a photograph and hair lock of Willie Lincoln, the president’s son who died in 1862 at age 11; Mary Lincoln’s linen nightcap, leather letter box, and ivory letter opener; the Lincolns’ White House china and a chamber pot, and a Ford’s Theatre chair.

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The public is seeing only “a small portion” of her private collection, Louise Taper said, adding that she has lost count of how many artifacts remain in vaults. None have been kept at home since she accidentally damaged one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s cloth fans during a costume party six years ago. She declined to discuss the collection’s value, although experts estimate the Tapers have spent many millions.

Irving Stone’s biographical novel, “Love Is Eternal,” about Lincoln and Mary Todd, triggered Louise Taper’s fascination. After reading the book 22 years ago, she took a part-time job at a rare manuscripts dealer in Beverly Hills. Instead of cash, she was paid with her first Lincoln-signed document, a presidential note about a low-level judicial appointment.

Barry Taper became her ally at Lincoln auctions soon after the couple’s marriage in 1985. “It was easier to join than to fight,” he said tongue-in-cheek recently.

Besides opening on Lincoln’s birthday, the Chicago show coincides with the start of the presidential primary season. Louise Taper notes that many current candidates use a Lincoln bust as a television prop during speeches. But Lincoln, she stressed, never had speech writers or spin doctors. “We are,” she pronounced, “living in a different day and age.”

* Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.