Mar 25, 2021 - Sale 2562

Sale 2562 - Lot 314

Price Realized: $ 1,062
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(PERIODICALS.) Tops: Recording the Achievements of the Negro Race. Numerous illustrations. 48 pages. 4to, 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, original color wrappers, minor wear; minimal wear to contents. New York: Phame Publishing, 1938?

Additional Details

This issue has long features on Marian Anderson, Joe Louis, and Father Divine, and personal pieces authored by Duke Ellington and the magazine's own consulting editor, NAACP leader Walter White. Among the dozens of smaller blurbs are bits on Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, Richmond Barthé, Richard Wright, Zora Hurston, and "Nightclub Map of Harlem" cartoonist E. Simms Campbell. Closing the issue is a wider-ranging piece titled "Is There a Negro Society? A Negro Society Girl Writes What She Thinks."

Billed as "Volume One, Number Two," but no other issues have been traced. It received a glowing review in the California Eagle of 1 December 1938, but the well-connected society editor could not "for the life of me find anyone who knows when the first number came out." She concludes that "Every Negro ought to own a copy." 6 in OCLC (this issue only); none traced at auction.