The first, and probably best known, American Lexicon of Freemason was compiled by Albert G. Mackay in 1845. The work relies for much of its information on the German Lenning-Mossdorf Lexicon, published in about 1822.

An earlier German Lexicon was published in 1818 by Johann Gaedicke, in Berlin.

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German authors who wrote about Freemasonry, and were Masons, include Gottfried Lessing ("Ernst and Falk" and "Nathan the Wise") and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe ("Wilhelm Meister").

Other famous authors who used Masonic themes include Lew Wallace, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Count Lev Nikolayevich (Leo) Tolstoy describes the initiation of a Candidate - Pierre Bezukhov - for Freemasonry into a Masonic Lodge in his epic work "War and Peace", published in 1869.

Tolstoy, who had studied Freemasonry, was not a Mason himself.

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Samuel Hemming, the first Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England, defined Freemasonry as being "a beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols."

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The rarest known Masonic book in the USA is the 1734 edition of Anderson's "Constitutions," printed by Benjamin Franklin. Seventeen copies of the original edition are known to exist.

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