?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(SLAVERY AND ABOLITION.) Brown, William Wells. Three Years in Europe. Frontispiece portrait. Small 8vo, publisher's gilt pictorial cloth, worn, coming detached from text block; lacking free endpapers, moderate foxing, wear, and soiling. London: Charles Gilpin, 1852
first edition. Brown was an escaped slave who had launched a very public career as an author and abolitionist. Living in constant danger from the Fugitive Slave Act, he was forced into exile in Europe to avoid capture. He is now best remembered for writing the first novel by an African-American, 1853's Clotide. An expanded first American edition of Brown's European narrative was issued in 1855 as "The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad," but no copies of this first edition are known at auction. Sabin 8596; not in Work (see the 1855 edition on page 476).
