Negro Anthology made by Nancy Cunard 1931-1933

London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co, 1934. First Edition. One of 1,000 copies. Large quarto (31.5cm); publisher's dark brown buckram, with titles stamped in red on spine and front cover, and a map of "The Black Belt of America" on rear cover; dark brown topstain; viii,[2],3-855pp; with numerous half-tone and other illustrations throughout, including the color fold-out map of Africa tipped in between p.584-585. Modest external wear (particularly to base of spine and upper and lower front joint), gently spine-sunned, light wear to topstain, with a touch of dust-soil to covers, and faint foxing to endpapers and text edges (occasionally extending into the margins); small closed tear to lower edge of title page, with a tiny puncture to one lower fold on the map; hinges sound; a solidly Very Good copy.

A monumental work, compiling some 250 contributions by more than 150 authors (two-thirds of whom were Black), privately published and financed by Cunard, a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin and heiress to the Cunard shipping fortune. Blockson notes Cunard's "bohemian spirit" and "unbending devotion to ending racial prejudice" and calls Negro "a landmark in African-American literature (see BLOCKSON 71, p.53-5). Cunard stated her purpose in publishing Negro was to show "that there was no superior race, merely cultural differences, that racism has no basis whatsoever." Among the impressive list of contributors were Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Jomo Kenyatta, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and many other key figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Of the 1,000 copies printed, many hundreds were destroyed during the blitz of London -- an assertion that was long offered by dealers without documentation, but which is indeed supported by an annotation in Cunard's own copy (held by the Ransom Center), dated October 1941: "...what remained of the whole edition has been destroyed by bombs and fire last years (Sept.), save 10 copies, saved by E.E. Wishart, as if in prevision." This fact, along with the book's unwieldy size and fragile binding, accounts for the scarcity of attractive copies in the marketplace; the present example being among the nicer copies we have handled. BLOCKSON 71; PERRY 761 (The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary). 88436.