Le Nègre comme il y a Peu de Blancs.

£12,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very Rare. OCLC records copies at UCLA , University of Rochester , Yale (defective: “t.-p. and p. 1-2 of v. 2 wanting; Manuscript leaf inserted for p. 1-2”), Lilly Library and Library Company of Philadelphia (we have not been able to find this in the online catalogue) only in the USA. No copies recorded in the UK. A second edition in French was published in 1791 and a third in 1795. Translated into English as The Negro as there are few White men by J. Trapp (London: printed for the author, 1790, dedicated to William Wilberforce ) and as The negro equalled by few Europeans (London: by G.G.J and J. Robinson c.1790). A translation was also published in Philadelphia in 1801 which paired the novel with poems by Phillis Wheatley ( The Negro equalled by few Europeans: translated from the French : to which are added, poems on various subjects, moral and entertaining by Phillis Wheatley, Negro servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New-England (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1801). The very rare first edition of an important abolitionist novel published in Paris under a disguised imprint (“a Madras”) in the midst of the French Revolution. The story follows the life of Itanoko, a black African prince born in Senegal, who is captured by slave traders and crosses the Atlantic to Saint-Domingue as a slave. Lavellée specifically states in his preface that he has cast his abolitionist message as a novel as, “un roman est lu de tout monde.” The novel includes a very shocking and det

• Binding: Hardcover

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