HALEY, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Doubleday. 1976. Thick 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s quarter black cloth over brown boards, lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Al Nagy. This copy with the publisher’s compliments slip affixed by paperclip to front endpaper, signed by an editor. A very good to near fine example, the cloth clean, slightly rubbed to the corners and spine tips. The binding tight and square, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped ($12.50), a trifle rubbed at the spine tips, but a smart and bright example overall, uncommon as such.
An excellent example of arguably the author’s most famous work. Haley grew up revelling in a story told by his grandmother, of her grandparents and their grandparents and of ‘the African’ who, she claimed, lived across the ocean, who was jumped, beaten, kidnapped, chained and claimed, then put on a ship heading for Colonial America. Years later, when Haley was a respected writer after his first publication, ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’, he began to investigate his grandmother’s story. After ten years and half a million miles of travel across three continents, Haley found not only ‘the African’—Kunta Kinte—but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter. The book was an immediate bestseller and ignited genealogical interest specifically in African Americans—he was the first such black American to trace his ancestry. ABC quickly adapted it to screen and the miniseries earned a record-breaking 130-million viewership.
HALEY, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Doubleday. 1976. Thick 8vo. First edition, first printing. Publisher’s quarter black cloth over brown boards, lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dust jacket designed by Al Nagy. This copy with the publisher’s compliments slip affixed by paperclip to front endpaper, signed by an editor. A very good to near fine example, the cloth clean, slightly rubbed to the corners and spine tips. The binding tight and square, the contents clean and fine throughout. The dust jacket unclipped ($12.50), a trifle rubbed at the spine tips, but a smart and bright example overall, uncommon as such.
An excellent example of arguably the author’s most famous work. Haley grew up revelling in a story told by his grandmother, of her grandparents and their grandparents and of ‘the African’ who, she claimed, lived across the ocean, who was jumped, beaten, kidnapped, chained and claimed, then put on a ship heading for Colonial America. Years later, when Haley was a respected writer after his first publication, ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’, he began to investigate his grandmother’s story. After ten years and half a million miles of travel across three continents, Haley found not only ‘the African’—Kunta Kinte—but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter. The book was an immediate bestseller and ignited genealogical interest specifically in African Americans—he was the first such black American to trace his ancestry. ABC quickly adapted it to screen and the miniseries earned a record-breaking 130-million viewership.
