"12 Years a Slave" 1st edition goes on display

[theHandpuppet]

http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?NoCache=1&Dato=20140220&Kategori=NEWS&Lopenr=302200032&Ref=AR

The Cincinnati Enquirer
Feb. 19, 2014
Antique book on display is a testament to hope
Written by Cliff Radel

The 161-year-old bestseller of 2014 rests its weary spine on a pair of Plexiglas wings as it waits to be seen.

The work in question, a first-edition copy of Solomon Northup’s “Twelve Years a Slave,” is the narrative that inspired the Oscar-contending film “12 Years a Slave.” The 336-page volume goes on display Thursday at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The gift to the Freedom Center from longtime supporters John and Francie Pepper details Northup’s firsthand account of a harrowing 12-year saga during which the violinist and carpenter fought to regain his freedom. A 32-year-old free black man from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Northup was, as the first edition’s still highly readable title page notes, “kidnapped (into slavery) in Washington (D.C.) City in 1841 and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana.”

An illustration of Northup captioned “in his plantation suit” stands next to the title page. The lines of the illustration depicting him sitting next to a barrel and a broom appear as clear as they likely were when the book was printed in 1853, the year Ohio celebrated the 50th anniversary of its statehood during the presidency of Franklin Pierce.... MORE

[diabeticman]

1. My wife heard on NPR that No one knows where Solomon is buried. They know where his father and

son are buried but not Solomon.