Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings... by Harris, Joel Chandler - 1881

8vo. New York: Appleton, 1881. 8vo, [1]-231, (1), 8 (ads) pp. with black and white illustrations by Frederick Church and James Moser. Original blue cloth, stamped in black and gilt, butterfly patterned endpapers. Worn copy with hinges repaired and signs of damp, gilt on upper cover still bright and attractive. Front endpapers with the signature of and bookplate of T. Edward Chisenhale Marsh, Trinity College, Cambridge, and various dealer notes. § First edition, first state per BAL with “presumptive” on page 9. (BAL ascribes no order of precedence to the several colours of cloth used in binding the first edition.) A classic of American children’s 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. BAL 7100. Grolier Children’s 100 #45. Grolier American 100 #83. Peter Parley to Penrod p.56.