?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
Cunard, Nancy (1896-1965) Negro Anthology, with a tipped-in A.L.S. to Karl Marx's niece
London: Wishart & Co. for Nancy Cunard, 1934.
First edition, quarto; illustrated with a folding map printed in red and blue and numerous black-and-white photographs throughout; bound in original full dark brown cloth boldly lettered in red across the front board and spine, lower board stamped in red with the map of "The Black Belt of America," dark brown top stain (minor tear at stub of folding map, gentle dampstain waving to upper corner of leaves, small paper flaw to margin of p. 355; cloth a touch faded, mostly at spine, minor dampstaining to top edge); 12 1/8 x 9 3/4 in.
[Together with] Autograph letter signed in blue ink by Nancy Cunard to English publisher and Karl Marx's niece, Erica Marx (1909-1969), dated April 14, 1957, in Nice, in which Cunard encourages Marx's efforts to organize "a Negro Programme-with music." Though unable to help with her idea, Cunard provides the address for Caribbean writer and journalist Eric Walrond at Roundway Hospital in Devizes; one double-sided leaf, tipped-in to front free fly leaf, octavo; 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.
"It was necessary to make this book…for the recording of the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them, of the Negro people." (Quoted from the foreword).
This monumental anthology presents many aspects of Black life and letters emerging from the decades following World War One in a virtually encyclopedic format. It features work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois; essays on everyone from Phyllis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Josephine Baker; hard-hitting essays on the slave trade, lynching, prison labor, Scottsboro, and the Klan, as well as coverage of current developments in Africa and the West Indies.
Editor Nancy Cunard, the transatlantic shipping liner heiress and direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, was a prominent figure in European literary and artistic circles who devoted much of her life to fighting against political and racial inequality. A substantial portion of the original edition of 1000 are said to have been lost in a German bombing raid on London. "Virtually unobtainable […] however, no comprehensive African American library is complete without it." Blockson One Hundred and One, 71.
