Swann Galleries Celebrates 30th Anniversary of Annual Printed & Manuscript African Americana Auctions

The annual Swann Galleries Printed & Manuscript African Americana sales was launched in March 1996 by Wyatt Houston Day who was the specialist for the first 22 sales.

On March 19, the ninth Printed & Manuscript African Americana sale handled by Swann’s Americana specialist Rick Stattler will take place, the latest in what Swann describes as "the first and only regularly scheduled auction in the world to focus on Black history".

"When the auction was launched, many libraries, archives, and museums across the country were just starting to recognize the need to increase their representation of Black history," said a Swann spokesperson. "For 30 years now, Swann has been a leading conduit for bringing this source material from private hands into public hands."

Previous highlights have included:

• in 2001, a manuscript entitled The Bondswoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, Recently Escaped from North Carolina, 1888 to 1930, published the following year, and now recognized as the only surviving novel written by an enslaved woman
• in 2017, a Civil War-era album of carte-de-visite photographs, including a previously unknown early portrait of Harriet Tubman circa 1860s
• in 2019, an archive of letters to the Washington family discussing the enslaved people of Mount Vernon in the 1840s
• In 2021, two groups of papers of the modern dancer Katherine Dunham featuring her diary and extensive personal correspondence

Highlights from the March 19 auction include:

• a 1903 first edition, first printing of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
• works by the important early Black photographers John Presley Ball and Daniel Freeman
• a large 1900 promotional poster for soprano Mattie Vera Wilkes
• a copy of The Bronze American National Travel Guide, 1961-62, a late competitor to the Green Book
• an admission card to the February 1895 funeral of Frederick Douglass