2 Booker T. Washington first editions are documented on this shelf, from The Future of the American Negro (1899) to Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Booker T. Washington title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

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The Future of the American Negro — 1899 · Small, Maynard & CompanyThe title page is dated 1899 and reads 'Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, Publishers.' The first edition collates x, 3-244 pages with a stub between pages 4 and 5 and one final blank leaf, illustrated with a portrait frontispiece of Washington. It is bound in the publisher's maroon (red-brown) cloth stamped in gilt, top edge gilt with the other edges untrimmed. Small, Maynard issued the book in three issues after the 1899 first, with the entire run limited to roughly 5,000 copies total; Washington's far better-known Up from Slavery (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901) is a different, later book and should not be mistaken for a reprint of this title.
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography — 1901 · Doubleday, Page & CompanyNew York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901. The first edition is an octavo of x, 330 pp., bound in the publisher's ribbed maroon (burgundy) cloth stamped in gilt, with a gilt top edge, and carries a tipped-in photogravure frontispiece portrait of Washington with facsimile signature facing the title page. The copyright page reads "Copyright, 1900, 1901, by Booker T. Washington" — the double date reflects the book's…. US precedence; the census claim of Doubleday, Page (New York), 1901 is correct. The 1901 Doubleday, Page issue is the true first book edition — the text had already run serially in The Outlook, so the book is the first appearance in book form rather than the first appearance of the text. Do not confuse it with Washington's earlier and separate autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work (J. L. Nichols, 1900), a…. No book-club issue is documented for the 1901 Doubleday, Page edition in the sources consulted. Later Doubleday, Page and Doubleday, Doran printings reset or reissue the text; note that Doubleday imprints reading "Garden City, New York" reflect the firm's later address and therefore postdate the 1901 New York first. The many modern "first thus" reprints — Norton Critical, Dover Thrift, Penguin, Library of America….

More Nonfiction & Memoir shelves: Brian Greene, C. Vann Woodward, Carl Sagan, Carl von Clausewitz, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell.

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