Ode to the Black Bouquinistes: Bibliomaniacs of the Black Radical Tradition

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 399 Ode to the Black Bouquinistes: Bibliomaniacs of the Black Radical Tradition Roderick A. Ferguson Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History is the book that Paul Coates coedited with Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, former chief librarian of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Thomas C. Battle, the Center’s former director. Battle says this in the book’s introduction: “For many years black bibliophiles and collectors have played a major and largely overlooked role in the collection and preservation of the documentary and cultural heritage of people of African descent”(xiii). Explaining the significance of these bibliophiles and collectors, Battle notes that the major repositories for black history at Howard University, New York Public Library, Fisk University, Atlanta University, and the Library of Congress owe their holdings to the efforts of these unsung and heroic “bibliomaniacs,” to use famed librarian and archivist Dorothy Porter Wesley’s term (3). In the time of the book’s publication, Coates had been working with Des Verney Sinnette on the staff of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Citing Coates’s own efforts as part of what occasioned the publication of the volume, Battle observed, “Paul Coates, the former owner of the Black Book bookstore in Baltimore, Maryland, and publisher of important out-of-print works through the Black Classic Press, has long maintained a strong personal interest in collectors, particularly book collectors, because of his involvement in these two endeavors” (xiv). Indeed, Coates would sell books in front of Howard’s Cramton Auditorium and would go into Founders Library to warm up on cold winter days. As he stated,“My whole idea to be a publisher began at Founder’s Library” (Reid). As someone who spent his undergraduate years at Howard University, I remember the booksellers, like Coates, with their tables set up in front of Cramton auditorium, on Sixth Street in front of the administration building, or on Georgia Avenue. These booksellers were so ubiquitous that they became part of the “Howard experience,” selling their books, t-shirts, prayer rugs, keffiyahs, mud cloth, and kufis. In the years when I attended the “Mecca”—from 1990 to 1994—the booksellers who lined the campus’s main street were as much a part of university life as the other students and faculty members. It was not uncommon that we could find texts for our courses among the booksellers, texts such as The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Cheikh Anta Diop’s Precolonial Black Africa, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Little did I know it then, but these books were the products of years of dedicated and tireless collecting that was part of an effort to produce a history of black radical traditions. 400 CLA JOURNAL Roderick A. Ferguson We get a glimpse at the world that those booksellers and collectors helped to produce in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s first book. In Between the World and Me (2015), Coates writes about what Howard University means for him, telling of how the school’s diasporic diversity would shape his sense of racial identity and consciousness. The booksellers would contribute to the diversity that Coates notes in Between the World and Me, a diversity that takes shape in the school’s national and transnational position as the educational institution for blacks from around the world. Yet we must not forget that he wrote of Howard’s booksellers and bibliophiles in The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and An Unlikely Road to Manhood (2008) as well, particularly through his father’s connection to Founders Library and his work as a book merchant.1 Writing of his father’s association with the school in the early 1970s, he states,“[Dad] would pack his car with Knowledge of Self and drive over to Howard University. He set up a table, and on it displayed many volumes of concealed history and radical lore. In those days, Howard was the foundation of all things right with the Race” (26). Here,I engage Paul Coates,not only as a bookseller but also as an organic intellectual who—through the texts that they collected on...