Ben King's Southland Melodies.
Chicago: Forbes and Company, 1911. Hardcover. Photographs by Essie Collins Matthews and Leigh Richmond Miner. 8vo. Light green cloth with gilt lettering and ivory and dark green decorative borders. 128pp, (2pp ads). Frontispiece, numerous full-page illustrations, ornamental page borders, decorative endpapers. Very good. Faint binding edgewear. Item #42898
Tight and attractive first edition of these "negro dialect" poems by this little-known white poet and humorist (1857-94), with illustrations by these Hampton Institute Camera Club photographers (which institute also shot the images for Paul Dunbar's "Poems of Cabin and Field" and similar works) showing African-Americans at home, at work and in various settings. A lovely copy.
Price: $95.00