Mar 24, 2022 - Sale 2598

Sale 2598 - Lot 222

Price Realized: $ 23,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. xvi, 125 pages. Small 8vo, publisher's calf-backed printed paper-covered boards, minimal wear; minor foxing; early owner's pencil signature and doodles on the endpapers. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847; Rochester, NY: North Star Office, 1848

Additional Details

Third edition, second state--bound and issued by Douglass at his press--and one of the few instances of a book's later edition being more important than the first. Late in 1847, not long after returning from his period of English exile, Frederick Douglass moved from Boston to upstate New York and began publishing his own newspaper, to be called the "North Star." He brought with him some loose printed sheets of the Boston Anti-Slavery Society's 1847 third edition of his Narrative. Once established in Rochester, he had them bound up as they are here, with the North Star imprint. We have traced no copies of the North Star binding with the frontispiece plate found in the Boston first issue; Douglass apparently did not bring the engravings along with the text sheets.

The original owner of this copy, Daniel McWilliams of Rochester, signed and inscribed it in 1850. This appears to be the Daniel McWilliams (1820-1883), born in Scotland, who was listed as a tinman in the 1851 Rochester directory, was in the 1860 census in nearby Albion as a tinsmith, and wrote a serialized memoir for the Neighbor's Home Mail in 1874, "An Autobiography: How I Became a Drunkard." In the June 1874 installment (page 107), he discusses his time in Rochester and working in a tin shop, although he does not mention any connection to the abolitionist movement. Nor can we guess why he decorated both pastedowns with crude sketches of hands. He died in East Bloomfield, NY.

This Rochester issue is believed to be the only book Douglass ever issued from his own press, and this is by far the finest of the six examples we have traced at auction.