Black Bibliography as Biographical Method: The Publication History of The Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery, 1837–1849.

This article considers the fugitive slave narrative as an important episode in the history of the book. It notes the multiple editions to which many of these books ran, and the difficulty of determining a comprehensive bibliographic record of publication. We establish this bibliographic record for Moses Roper's autobiography, Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery , whose sixteen editions were published between 1837 and 1849 in English and Welsh, in what the article identifies as six phases of publication. The article argues for the documentary importance of the paratextual material and visual imagery folded into each edition as extensions of the autobiographical record and, therefore, moments of historical redefinition that respond to the material, economic, social, and cultural conditions of production. This includes the capacity of Black writing to establish spheres of Atlantic print culture other than Anglophone. The article shows that the bibliographic surfeit of nineteenth-century Black writing exemplified by Roper's work provides an untapped biographical resource in which important clues to the biographies of their authors, and of their families in slavery and in freedom, lie hidden in plain sight. Bibliographic attention to Roper's work therefore reveals the novel ways in which the book was systematized as a form of archival practice at a time when it was necessary to travel light, and the public sphere provided one of the few hopes of establishing a durable record of the author's personal and family history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]