The ‘reprint revolution’ and cultures of 20th c. Black publishing

Please note that this blog post contains historic uses of language which is outdated, offensive, and discriminatory. The language is retained in its original context and does not represent views of UCL Special Collections. We are commitment to contextualising and addressing dated and harmful languages in our collecting practice, collection documentation, teaching, and engagement activities. You can read about some of our work in this area as part of UCL’s Liberating the Collections programme here.  

 

In 1969, the USA publishing market saw “increasing numbers of reprints of old volumes by and about black Americans […] pouring off the presses,” as one review put it in the February issue of Negro Digest. Presses such as Arno Press, Negro Universities Press, Dover Publishing, and the book division of Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher of Ebony, a popular African American magazine, emerged in the 1960s to republish significant, out-of-print works of Black American history. Developed at the backdrop of the civil rights struggles and the new civil liberties – as well as disappointments – of the Black Power era, these presses positioned their work as a restorative and reparative effort to recover the work of and on Black American experience. The Crisis described this boom in reprints as a “revolution,” and an important new means of making Black American history visible and accessible.

At UCL, we hold examples of, among others, the Negro University Press (NUP) publications. An imprint of Greenwood Publishers, an educational an academic publisher which specialised in reprints, NUP produced an extensive list in its “The Black Experience in America” series. Among NUP’s most notable publications was a history of slavery in the USA, published as a 125-volume series of reprinted books which were originally published between the late 19^th c. and the 1930s. And while monographs constituted NUP’s principal specialism, the press also reprinted notable African-American periodicals, including the Crisis, and National Anti-Slavery Standard. And this is perhaps where their work proved most impactful, often recovering full periodical runs of otherwise hard to find publications.

NUP’s reprints, both books and periodicals, tended to be published as facsimile editions with no additional content or editorial interventions. In fact, facsimiles, rather than new editions, were very common among the publishers contributing to this Black publishing revival of the 1960s. The facsimile reprints were a practical choice; they made possible quick, efficient, and relatively cheap means of reproducing existing works – all important considerations for the heavily profit-driven reprints market. But this particular approach to bringing out-of-print works back into circulation also played into the contemporary desire for recovering the ‘authentic’ African American experience, here mediated through a historically significant text. And it was this desire for authenticity that was captured in and through the facsimile, a type of reproduction which “aims to invoke the virtual presence of the source, so the bond between reproduction and source is not only graphical and material but is also defined by a retrospective relationship between two points in history, the then and the now.” The sources of the reprint were typically acknowledged in all NUP volumes, further reaffirming the connection with the original.

Many of the reprint publications were aimed at academic audiences and libraries. Their arrival was made possible by significant changes in the library practice in the first half of the 20^th century, and especially the work of African-American bibliographers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, and librarians such as Dorothy Porter of the Howard University whose  transformative work on library classification systems not only placed Black writing centre stage in many collections, it also created demand for more publications by Black authors. As Laura E. Helton notes, by the early 1930s there was a growing set of the so-called New Negro Libraries in the USA which held collections on and by African Americans. But existing library classification systems lacked vocabularies for their effective description. “For librarians of ‘Negro Collections,’” Helton writes, “the marginality of blackness […] politicised every instance of numbering, naming, and filing.” According to Helton, the period roughly between 1900 to the end of World War II was “compulsively documentary,” marked by collective efforts of building collections for the study of Black history and literature, of addressing their historic lack, and developing systems for their organisation and description, that is, of “making a field.”

By the time the NUP and other reprint publishers emerged, that landscape looked very different. The larger project of the 1960s reprints was a direct consequence of the work of librarians and bibliographers like Du Bois and Porter, and a response to the transformed conditions of Black writing, reading, and research. NUP was, in fact, set up, as its 1969 catalogue explained “to be an easily accessible publishing medium for […] American Negro colleges.” It run a dedicated ‘Standing Order Plan’ to aid library acquisitions and was to be “a complete, profession publishing organisation.” That is, the press positioned itself as serious scholarly endeavour; it presented acceptable, institutionalised, now increasingly canonised Black history.

Characteristically, NUP and other reprint publishers of the period also explicitly distanced themselves from the radical, small, independent publishers of the Black Liberation Movement and the Black bookshop networks which distributed them (one example is the Detroit-based Broadside Press, whose publications we also hold in our collection). As Joshua Clark Davis explains, “for many Black Power activists, reading works by black authors represented a fundamental step in political awakening, a central prerequisite of the intellectual and ideological transformation from Negro accommodationism to radical Black Power.” And the activist Black bookshops which emerged in the 1960s USA were the place of such radical reading. They were at once places to buy books, unique information centres, and important Black public spaces for community organising, explicitly supporting causes of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism.

Presses like the NUP represented crucial antiracist work always integral to cultures of Black print. But in rejecting their contemporary Black print activist networks, the reprint publishers also inevitably limited the horizon of 1960s Black prints’ radical possibilities. The politics of the reprints represented a characteristic position of the liberal centre and its narratives of diversity, inclusion, and assimilation – of one American history – rather than that of Black struggle for radical Black liberation. The reprint revolution was both transformative in making accessible and ‘legitimising’ Black history on an unprecedented scale, and at the same time, it was a means of controlling and containing the types of Black histories made available and their impacts on the American reading public.  “What if,” to borrow from Fielder and Senchyne, “print and infrastructures surrounding it might more often be constraining rather than freeing? The book form itself […] might actually be inextricable from the history of antiblack racism.”

This turn to reprints in the 1960s was not a new phenomenon. I wrote earlier in this short series of our Black History Month posts about the important role that reprinting played in popularising the abolitionist message of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (and in turning the novel into an international bestseller too). And like the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reprinting African American books in the 1960s was good business. Porter, in fact, bemoaned this popularity of reprinting, which she saw as “largely characterised by white publishers’ insatiable desire for ‘putting [into circulation] everything [Black] that they could get their hands on.” The history of the reprints is, then, as Autumn Womack explains, “a question about how and why […] Black literary production gets circulated.” The reprint boom of the 1960s is a marker of the lasting history of Black publishing shaped by complex ecologies of reuse and reproduction, and tensions between constant struggle for freedom and profiteering. Simultaneously liberating and regulating, the gesture of reprinting is more than a mechanism for reproducing content; it is a complex technology long associated with radical fight for voice, representation, and visibility.

This blog post is the last instalment in the UCL Special Collections Black History Month series exploring black histories through histories of print and publishing. 

Other posts in the series:

Reprinting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Kaja Marczewska

Independent Black Publishing and UCL’s collecting practices, by Liz Lawes