Dayton: Published by United Brethren Publishing House, 1893.
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Hardcover. First edition. Red cloth titled in gilt on front cover (see further note below). Tiny tear on the edge of the first leaf of text, else a fine copy. Housed in a custom cloth clamshell case with printed paper spine-label. No priority to cloth color has been established, and we have also handled copies in dark blue, brown, olive green, and red. *BAL 4916* notes only blue (presumably dark blue, as it is one of the more common colors). We assume the job printer had it bound in whatever colors of cloth came to hand. In our experience red is by far the rarest color. Despite *BAL's* assertion that blue was the primary binding, brown seems the most common.
500 copies of this book were printed, with some sources reporting that 250 of those were destroyed by a fire. Dunbar published the book at his own expense while working as an elevator operator; he sold the book to his elevator passengers for a dollar a copy and recouped his printing cost within two weeks.
Certainly this book is one of the handful of cornerstone titles of any serious collection of African-American literature. Probably the nicest copy we've seen of an important and rare book.
Item #463956
