"Howdy Honey Howdy" Dialectic Verse By Black American Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar with Photography by the Hampton Institute, First Edition 1905

Paul Laurence Dunbar

First Edition

[African American][Poetry] Dunbar, Paul Laurence. Howdy Honey Howdy. Illustrated with photographs by Leigh Richmond Miner. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1905. First edition.Original publisher’s pictorial brown cloth stamped in black, red, and gilt, with a mounted halftone photograph of an African American woman on the front cover. Spine decorated with floral motif. Illustrated throughout with mounted photographic plates by Leigh Richmond Miner of the Hampton Institute Camera Club, each paired with one of Dunbar’s poems, and with Art Nouveau page decorations by Will Jenkins. This strikingly produced volume presents Black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s verse, much of it in dialect, alongside staged photographic tableaux of African American life. The images, posed by students at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, were intended to harmonize with Dunbar’s lyric depictions of rural and domestic Black experience. The combination of poetry, photography, and decorative design situates the book within both the “plantation tradition” and the turn-of-the-century aesthetic movement. Dunbar (1872–1906), the first African American poet to achieve national prominence, used his dialect verse to capture the cadences of African American speech, while also negotiating the expectations of white audiences. The book is especially notable for its collaboration with Hampton Institute, an institution founded to educate freedpeople and Indigenous students, whose camera club documented African American life at a moment when mainstream visual culture often trafficked in racist caricature. "Howdy Honey Howdy" thus represents a rare early 20th-century fusion of Black-authored poetry with images by African American photographers, giving the volume both literary and cultural importance. Light shelfwear to extremities, hinges firm, pages clean and bright. Overall near fine. A handsome copy of one of Dunbar’s most visually distinctive works, and a key artifact of African American book design at the turn of the century.

Item #22596

Price: $350.00