Twelve Years a Slave

Because the book sold briskly, an advertisement in The Liberator dated 26 August 1853 -- barely a month after publication -- already announced the 'Fourteenth Thousand' printing, credited jointly to Derby and Miller (Auburn) and the affiliated house of Derby, Orton and Mulligan (Buffalo); further printings marked 'Twentieth Thousand' followed, and the stereotype plates remained in use under the successor firm Miller, Orton and Mulligan through the mid-1850s as sales climbed toward 30,000 copies. Any copy whose title page states a print-run total ('___ Thousand') is a later printing, not the true first.