Rare Book School
Preliminary Reading List

Developing Collections of African-American Materials

Lucious Edwards, Jr & Michael Plunkett

Preliminary Advices

Choose any three:

• Basbanes, Nicholas A. A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and The Eternal Passion For Books. New York: Henry Holt and Co., c1995. Chapter entitled "Destiny" focuses on African American collectors, pp: 394-404.
• Blockson, Charles L. A Commented Bibliography Of One Hundred And One influential Books By And About People Of African Descent (1556-1982): a collector's choice. Amsterdam: A. Gerits & Sons, 1989.
• Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped In Rainbows: the Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, c2003.
• Carretta, Vincent and Gould, Philip, ed. Genius In Bondage: Literature Of The Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c2001.
• Franklin, John Hope. George Washington Williams, a Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Franklin, John Hope. Mirror To America: The Autobiography Of John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Dubois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993.
• Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: H. Holt, c2000. Concluding volume of the biography.
• "North American Slave Narratives" in Documenting the American South, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/. Read the introduction by William L. Andrews.
• Sinnette, Elinor Des Verney, Coates, W. Paul, Battle, Thomas C. editors. Black Bibliophiles And Collectors: Preservers Of Black History. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1990.
• Spingarn, Arthur B. "Collecting a Library of Negro Literature," The Journal of Negro Education, Vol 7, No 1, 1938.