?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
(SLAVERY & ABOLITION.) Benjamin Godwin. Lectures on Slavery . . . with Additions to the American Edition. 258 pages. 8vo, contemporary cloth with printed paper spine label, minimal wear; minor foxing, burn in margin of leaf 5:3 without loss of text; early anti-slavery bookplates on front endpapers. Boston, 1836
First American edition, expanded from the 1830 London edition, of anti-slavery lectures by an English Baptist minister.
Perhaps even more noteworthy than the book are the wonderful bookplates on the front endpapers. A tag on the front pastedown is from an unnamed abolitionist bookseller in the famed Providence Arcade, built in 1828 as the nation's first enclosed shopping mall. It advertises "the most valuable Anti-Slavery Books, Pamphlets, Pictures &c. . . . Immense good is done by their circulation in every family, and every cent of profit arising from the sale, goes toward the support and extension of the cause." Facing it on the front free endpaper is a full-page bookplate from the "Anti-Slavery Library, belonging to the Providence Ladies . . . Anti-Slavery Societies," giving their 8-point conditions of membership. Pencil notes explain that the book was purchased from bookseller James Cummins for $2000 on the strength of the bookplates.
Afro-Americana 4148; Sabin 27671; Shaw & Shoemaker 37668. One other traced at auction since 1921.
