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A Note from Wyatt Houston Day
Reflections on 20 Years
It would have been difficult to imagine when we began offering standalone
Printed & Manuscript African Americana auctions in 1995 that the department
would progress as far as it has over the last two decades. Black history matters,
and it is our sincere hope that the material we have brought together for this
20th Anniversary sale, as well as the material in all the prior sales, has helped
shine some much-needed light on a rich but widely-neglected history.
In 1995, there was no dependable market for most African-American material.
Beyond my work as a specialist, I am a collector, and as a collector and a dealer,
it became increasingly clear to me that the newly emerging market for African
Americana was all over the place. In fact, when we first started organizing these
sales, one could buy a copy of Harriet Jacobs’
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
for anywhere between $500 and $750; the same was true for Solomon
Northup’s
12 Years A Slave.
In 1995, African-American books were so new to
the average bookseller that a knowledgeable collector could find real sleep-
ers on the shelves of his or her local bookshop with reasonable frequency.
A mere twenty years ago, there was no public venue where African Americana
could be regularly found in the manner in which white, mainstream Americana
had been made available. There were no major public sales like the Streeter Sale
or specialist booksellers like Eberstadt or Dekker. As a result, there was no tradi-
tional frame of reference to which the average bookseller or collector could turn
in order to price this material sensibly and fairly.
Before we had the opportunity to see a few years’ results from this sale, the
average small bookseller who found a cache of African-American books and
tracts had to “shoot from the hip” as far as what to pay and finally, how to price,
what they had purchased. There were only a handful of dealers who regularly
carried African Americana, and the price differential between them was at times
so disparate as to leave the average collector baffled.
So-called “price guides” were even more confusing. A then-current 1995 guide
suggested a price for the 1845 Frederick Douglass
Narrative
, of “$75 to $125” –
I’ll have five please!
Autograph material presented even more difficulties for both dealer and collector.
How could you begin to price a letter from Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria
Child, or W. E. B. Du Bois when there were hardly any auction records for them?