Very rare first edition, first printing of the extensive autobiography of Frederick Douglass, issued with the promotional cataloguing of Twelve Years a Slave in the rear.

 The last example noted as including the Northrup advertisement sold at Skinner [2022] for $7,500 with commissions.

Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895) My Bondage and My Freedom New York & Auburn: Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, 1855. First edition.

A very reasonably preserved example. The cloth binding itself is fair only, being heavily faded and rubbed with white stains to front board. The binding itself is solid, the ffep neatly folded at corner, frontis of Douglas crisp and clear with some scattered foxing and very slight dampstain at lower inner margin, not affecting image.

From there until the first full page lithograph [p.33], the text is very clean. The lithograph [on different paper as usual] is moderately foxed with a nearly identical tide mark to frontis. This leads us to believe the three lithographs received their staining prior to binding since all surrounding text is clean.

This provides possible insight into the variants in the first edition. Since the lithographs, if already stained, would likely have been used later in the binding process, after the clean examples were used up, this might explain the presence of the promotional for Northrup’s work being present in only some of the first editions. Perhaps the catalogue including Twelve Years a Slave was only completed toward the end of the binding process and thus included in only those assembled later in the run. The remainder of the text generally very clean and crisp, a few minor locations of foxing, one brown section toward the gutter probably from something acidic stored in the block. Far better text than usual. The catalogue has a tide mark at foredge. 

A textually good + to very good example.