?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 12,000 - $ 18,000
(ENTERTAINMENT.) E. Simms Campbell, artist. A Night-Club Map of Harlem,featured in the inaugural issue of "Manhattan: A Weekly for Wakeful New Yorkers." 16 pages, 16 x 12 inches, on 4 unbound folding sheets, with the map appearing as pages 8 and 9 of the 16 x 24-inch centerfold spread; folds, minor edge wear, short closed separations at folds, light soiling to page 1 only. With the original 8 x 8 illustrated wrapper printed in blue and black, minimal wear. [New York], 18 January 1933
First printing of the famous map depicting the height of the Harlem Renaissance. It serves as a guide to the old speakeasies and night-clubs that dotted the landscape during the Prohibition era, which ended later that year. The Savoy Ballroom, the Cotton Club featuring Cab Calloway's Band ("one of the fastest stepping revues in N.Y."), Gladys's Clam House (a gay speakeasy featuring drag artists: "Gladys Bentley wears a tuxedo and high hat and tickles the ivories"), Tillie's Chicken Shack, and many others are shown, with little vignettes throughout of Harlem characters, such as Jeff Blount of the Radium Club, Snakehips Earl Tucker, the "Reefer Man," the "Crab Man," Don Redman, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson ("The world's greatest tapdancer"). The caption recommends "a dozen Marahuana cigarettes guaranteed to give a three-day jag," and explains the numbers racket: "Most of the gamblers pick their numbers from dream books." The artist Simms Campbell (1906-1971) was best known as an Esquire artist from 1933 until the late 1950s, the first Black illustrator whose work was featured regularly in national periodicals. The original artwork for this remarkable map hammered for $80,000 in Swann's 31 March 2016 sale, one of the all-time highlights of our annual Printed and Manuscript African Americana sales.
