WASHINGTON, Booker T. UP FROM SLAVERY An Autobiography. Bound in vertically ribbed wine red cloth with gilt titling, and a photogravure frontispiece. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York City, 1901. 1st edition, hb cloth. 8vo, pp. ix, 330. Top edge gilt. Small, quite old, label affixed to top left of front pastedown: "Private Library of Sadie Sanborn Smith".

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was a black leader and educator. Shortly after emancipation, he began studies at the Hampton Institute, in Washington, DC, and became a teacher, writer and popular speaker on the problems of black Americans. In 1881, he was appointed Principal of the newly opened Tuskogee Institute, in Alabama, where he devised a curriculum to teach young black men and women practical skills useful in their lot in life. His autobiography is well written, often stirring, and has been in print since it was first published in 1901.

Despite this, Washington was often decried by his own people, especially Du Bois, for appeasement and for his benign acceptance of the separation of the races.

The boards are bumped at the corners and a bit rubbed at the extremities. There is some soiling and scuffing to the cloth, with a small abrasion or stain to the spine, just below the titling. The endpapers are a bit foxed and soiled, but they are tight and unmarked (save for the aforementioned label). The front hinge is cracked between the half title and the frontispiece. The tissue guard, protecting the frontispiece, is present, and the frontispiece, and the facsimile signature of Washington underneath, are in very good condition. The contents are unmarked, but there is occasional soiling from, one presumes, a grubby finger. The rear hinge is also cracked, between pp.

266/267, but overall the binding is still reasonably tight, and the book may be opened, and handled with care, but without trepidation. Still a good copy of a scarce, and important, book.

Price: $175.00US  $225 CDN  #30267