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Beloved — Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf · New York · 1987
First Edition · First Printing
The Book:
The first edition, first printing of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1987. The copyright page states “First Edition,” with no later-printing indication present. This copy retains its original cream cloth binding with silver stamping and original unclipped $18.95 dust jacket. Published six years before Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Condition:
Near Fine+ in a Fine original dust jacket. The book remains square and tight with clean cloth and a clean interior. The original unclipped $18.95 jacket remains bright and complete, showing only minor handling and age-related wear. No restoration, rebinding, or replacement components are observed.
Story Of The Book
Toni Morrison built Beloved around a terrible question: what could slavery make a mother believe was an act of love?
The novel was inspired by the documented story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped with her family from Kentucky to Ohio in 1856. When capture threatened to return them to slavery, Garner killed her young daughter rather than allow her to be taken back. Morrison transformed that history into the story of Sethe, an escaped woman whose home is haunted by the child she killed.
Published in 1987, Beloved refused to treat slavery as something safely contained in the American past. Morrison instead examined what remained after formal bondage ended: memory, trauma, fractured families, compromised choices, and experiences so violent that neither forgetting nor remembering them could be simple.
The novel restores interior lives to people whom slavery attempted to reduce to property—and insists that emancipation alone could not erase what had been done to them.
Why It’s In The Collection
Beloved belongs in Consigned to Darkness because it confronts one of the most absolute forms of institutional power in American history: the legal transformation of human beings into property.
Morrison’s achievement was to approach that system not primarily through laws, statistics, or political institutions, but through the lives slavery invaded. The novel asks readers to understand what domination meant inside families, memories, bodies, and relationships long after legal ownership ended.
This 1987 first printing preserves that argument at the moment Beloved entered American culture, before the Pulitzer Prize and before Morrison’s Nobel transformed the book into an established modern classic.
Collection Categories: Literature · Witness Literature · Civil Rights · Institutional Power · Social Criticism · Publication-Event Object
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Authentication Evidence
Copyright page states “First Edition,” consistent with the 1987 Knopf first edition.
No later-printing indication is present, consistent with first-printing status.
Title page identifies Alfred A. Knopf, New York, and is dated 1987.
Original cream/flecked publisher’s cloth binding is present.
Front board bears the correct silver-embossed angel/ghost figure.
Knopf Borzoi device is blind-embossed on the rear board, consistent with documented trade first-edition copies.
No separate book-club blind stamp or manufacturing mark is present on the rear board.
Original green-and-white headbands and deckled fore-edge are present, consistent with documented trade first-edition copies.
Original dust jacket retains the $18.95 publisher’s price on the front flap.
Rear jacket flap carries the documented 9/87 date code associated with first-printing jackets.
Jacket carries “Book-of-the-Month Club Selection” promotional language at the foot of the front flap; this configuration is documented on trade first-edition jackets and is not, by itself, evidence of book-club manufacture.
Collation of [x], 275, [3] pages is consistent with documented first-edition copies.
No evidence of rebinding, facsimile jacket, or replacement components is observed.
The combined copyright-page, binding, publisher-device, dimensional, and jacket evidence supports identification as the 1987 Alfred A. Knopf first edition, first printing.
Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf · New York · 1987
First Edition · First Printing
The Book:
The first edition, first printing of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1987. The copyright page states “First Edition,” with no later-printing indication present. This copy retains its original cream cloth binding with silver stamping and original unclipped $18.95 dust jacket. Published six years before Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Condition:
Near Fine+ in a Fine original dust jacket. The book remains square and tight with clean cloth and a clean interior. The original unclipped $18.95 jacket remains bright and complete, showing only minor handling and age-related wear. No restoration, rebinding, or replacement components are observed.
Story Of The Book
Toni Morrison built Beloved around a terrible question: what could slavery make a mother believe was an act of love?
The novel was inspired by the documented story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped with her family from Kentucky to Ohio in 1856. When capture threatened to return them to slavery, Garner killed her young daughter rather than allow her to be taken back. Morrison transformed that history into the story of Sethe, an escaped woman whose home is haunted by the child she killed.
Published in 1987, Beloved refused to treat slavery as something safely contained in the American past. Morrison instead examined what remained after formal bondage ended: memory, trauma, fractured families, compromised choices, and experiences so violent that neither forgetting nor remembering them could be simple.
The novel restores interior lives to people whom slavery attempted to reduce to property—and insists that emancipation alone could not erase what had been done to them.
Why It’s In The Collection
Beloved belongs in Consigned to Darkness because it confronts one of the most absolute forms of institutional power in American history: the legal transformation of human beings into property.
Morrison’s achievement was to approach that system not primarily through laws, statistics, or political institutions, but through the lives slavery invaded. The novel asks readers to understand what domination meant inside families, memories, bodies, and relationships long after legal ownership ended.
This 1987 first printing preserves that argument at the moment Beloved entered American culture, before the Pulitzer Prize and before Morrison’s Nobel transformed the book into an established modern classic.
Collection Categories: Literature · Witness Literature · Civil Rights · Institutional Power · Social Criticism · Publication-Event Object
———
Authentication Evidence
Copyright page states “First Edition,” consistent with the 1987 Knopf first edition.
No later-printing indication is present, consistent with first-printing status.
Title page identifies Alfred A. Knopf, New York, and is dated 1987.
Original cream/flecked publisher’s cloth binding is present.
Front board bears the correct silver-embossed angel/ghost figure.
Knopf Borzoi device is blind-embossed on the rear board, consistent with documented trade first-edition copies.
No separate book-club blind stamp or manufacturing mark is present on the rear board.
Original green-and-white headbands and deckled fore-edge are present, consistent with documented trade first-edition copies.
Original dust jacket retains the $18.95 publisher’s price on the front flap.
Rear jacket flap carries the documented 9/87 date code associated with first-printing jackets.
Jacket carries “Book-of-the-Month Club Selection” promotional language at the foot of the front flap; this configuration is documented on trade first-edition jackets and is not, by itself, evidence of book-club manufacture.
Collation of [x], 275, [3] pages is consistent with documented first-edition copies.
No evidence of rebinding, facsimile jacket, or replacement components is observed.
The combined copyright-page, binding, publisher-device, dimensional, and jacket evidence supports identification as the 1987 Alfred A. Knopf first edition, first printing.