Mar 01, 2012 - Sale 2271

Sale 2271 - Lot 186

Price Realized: $ 780
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(BUSINESS--DIRECTORIES.) COLEMAN, ROBERT W. The First Colored Professional, Clerical, Skilled and Business Directory of Baltimore City. Illustrated from photographs. 104 pages, 8vo, original printed stiff wrappers, lightly worn with punch-hole at the top left for hanging by one's telephone; rear cover re-atttached with archival paper. Baltimore: Coleman, 1916
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the sixteenth annual edition, of an exceptional directory, compiled by Robert W. Coleman, and bearing a long introduction by Eric C. Williams, the first African American to be professionally trained as a librarian.[at this time librarian at Howard University]. The compiler Robert W. Coleman, was the son of A.B. Colemen, who together with Frederick Douglass organized the 44th, 45th, and 55th Regiments during the Civil War. As a young adult, Coleman was stricken almost totally blind. But not to be deterred, he learned to be a piano tuner in order to earn a living. In his "odd hours" as Williams put it, Coleman began assembling the information for the first of these directories (1912), and the rest as they say is history. With wonderful advertisements for colored businesses. Pages 78 through 100 contain photographic portraits and biographies of Baltimore's prominent black citizens, ministers, lawyers etc. Excellent prime resource.