UNCLE REMUS, HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS: THE FOLK-LORE OF THE OLD PLANTATION.
Illustrated by Frederick S. Church and James Henry Moser.
- New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1, 3, and 5 Bond Street, 1881.
- 8vo
- Green cloth stamped with gilt rabbit on front and black cover gilt titled spine, white butterfly patterned endpapers
- (iv), 231, (1), (8 in ads) pages
Price: $1,000.00 other currencies
Order Nr. 138032
First edition, second state. (BAL 7100. Grolier Childrens 100 #45. Grolier American 100 #83. Peter Parley to Penrod p.56), with "presumptuous" on page 9, but the ads starting with "New Books. A Treatiste on the Practice of Medicine..." Ownership inscription in ink on front free endpaper. Minor shelfwear to the boards. A very bright copy. Internally fine, and scarce in this condition. (BAL ascribes no order of precedence to the several colours of cloth used in binding the first edition.) With numerous illustrations throughout, including many full page. Printed by D. Appleton and Company.
A classic of American childrens literature with a complicated legacy. Joel Chandler Harris, a white Southern journalist, collected these folktales from enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans on Georgia plantations. Serialized in newspapers across the country, they proved hugely popular, and this first collection published by Appleton in 1881 was bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The books were responsible for compounding racist stereotypes and disseminating them across generations of readers, as well as popularizing a false and rosy picture of the antebellum South. At the same time, Harris was the first folklorist to make a serious effort to preserve the Southern black oral traditions and his books have proved an important resource for ethnologists and contemporary African American writers seeking to reconstruct and reclaim traditional folktales.
The adventures of Brer Rabbit, the Tar Baby, Brer Fox etc. On the Grolier Club List of "100 Influential American Books," on the Newton List of "100 Good Novels," and one of Merle Johnson's "High Spots of American Literature."