THE STORY OF LITTLE BLACK SAMBO.
London: Grant Richards, 1899. Original light green cloth decorated in dark green.
First Edition, issued as the fourth volume in Grant Richards's diminutive series "The Dumpy Books for Children" -- of which the first three are long-forgotten. The Preface briefly describes how the Scotswoman Helen Bannerman (1863-1946), who married an army doctor and spent much of her life in southern India, came to write and illustrate this book:
Once upon a time there was an English lady in India, where black children abound and tigers are everyday affairs, who had two little girls. To amuse these little girls she used now and then to invent stories, for which, being extremely talented, she also drew and coloured the pictures. Among these stories Little Black Sambo, which was made up on a long railway journey, was the favourite; and it has been put into a Dumpy Book, and the pictures copied as exactly as possible, in the hope that you will like it as much as the two little girls did.
LITTLE BLACK SAMBO passed through five editions in its first year, and was quickly a household fixture in both the U.K. and the U.S.; its author tried to follow up on its popularity with several other similar books (for example LITTLE BLACK MINGO in 1901, LITTLE BLACK QUIBBA in 1902, LITTLE BLACK QUASHA in 1908 and LITTLE BLACK BOBTAIL in 1909) -- but only SAMBO was a big hit. (Incidentally some, like Schiller, have suggested that the success of this book prompted another series of books for children in this diminutive format of alternating text and color illustrations: Beatrix Potter's many titles, beginning with PETER RABBIT just two years later.)
For decades now, of course, LITTLE BLACK SAMBO has become synonymous with racist literature, and "Sambo" has become a slur word for Africans and African-Americans. To a degree this is a bum rap: the tale has nothing to do with Africans, but rather with the Tamil people who were Helen Bannerman's neighbors in southern India; furthermore, the tale itself celebrates the intelligence and ingenuity of these children. However, it is the names (and it gets worse: Sambo's parents are Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo), as well as the minstrel-show style of the author's own (amateur) color illustrations, that have taken (and deserve) especial flak. (In fact, for these reasons an edition was published in 1976, which retained the uplifting story while changing the names and replacing the illustrations, to show decidedly Indian people and clothing.)
LITTLE BLACK SAMBO is very scarce in its original binding in decent condition. It is easy to see why. Of course it was a book intended for children; yet because each leaf bears a colored plate, the book could not be bound conventionally with string. Instead, it is similar to what is today termed "perfect bound," with the stub of each leaf glued (with old gutta percha) to its neighbors and to an inner spine cloth. This means that in addition to the natural drying out of the gutta percha, it would take just one child trying once to lie the book flat to completely break the book at that juncture.
This is a very good-plus, perhaps near-fine copy. The flexible cloth binding has very little wear, though there a few faint wrinkles at the fore-edge of the front cover, and a couple of small inkmarks on the rear. The endpapers are tight but show some cracking; the leaves inside are quite clean, with the colored illustrations bright. The old glue (undoubtedly invisibly reinforced with new glue, as with just about all copies) continues to hold this copy together well. Quayle CHILDREN'S pp 101-102. Housed in a handsome morocco-backed clamshell case. Item #15869
Price: $4,950.00