The Book Collecting Practices of Black Magazine Editors

The Book Collecting Practices of Black Magazine Editors focuses on the collecting habits and personal libraries of three black magazine editors. Ben Burns and Era Bell Thompson were editors of important popular magazines, the Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet. Tom Dent edited Umbra and Nkombo, two important black literary magazines. This study is of interest to librarians, library educators, bibliophiles, historians, laypersons, and students of American culture. Building upon prior research in black bibliography, it examines the reasons why certain black press editors sought to assemble personal libraries of their own. The study focuses on the minds of the persons who assembled these collections, and it considers the effect of racial ideology on their collection building activities. The study also looks at how their collections are configured and what makes them useful.