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When ‘The Black Book’ was Published in 1974, with Toni Morrison as its in-house editor, it was an immediate commercial and critical success. With the hardcover priced at $15.00 and the paperback at $5.95, an eye-catching cover that echoed the design of a quilt, and an introduction by Bill Cosby, it was aggressively marketed to a mass audience. Cosby recorded five radio commercials: 160 press kits containing the book, the Cosby tapes and scripts, and quotes from an array of black artists and celebrities (including Muhammad Ali, B. B. King, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Alex Haley, Max Roach, and Alice Walker) were mailed to disk jockeys at black-oriented radio stations across the country. A “Black Book” record was cut, with lyrics based on the poem-written by but not attributed to Morrison-that graced the back cover. Morrison made numerous media appearances to promote the book. Parties were held in Chicago and New York; the star-studded gala at Charles Gallery, a restaurant on Harlem’s 125th Street, on 4 March 1974 was widely reported by local media, including television, radio, and newspapers. The effort paid off: on 15 April 1974, The Black Book was number nine on The New York Times trade paperback best seller list (Random Box 1146).
Co-edited by collectors Middleton Harris, Morris Levitt, and Roger Furman, the self-described “scrapbook” of African American history, won critical acclaim. In a competitive season, The Black Book garnered a nomination for the 1975 National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category, alongside Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Pirsig’s counterculture classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, and Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, which won the award. In recognition of its stunning design, The Black Book also received an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Several critics were effusive: Newsweek reviewer Margo Jefferson found that, like the best histories, “it informs, corrects and even inspires”; she also noted that the material required “a reader’s interpretation” (104). Donald Bogle in a review, “The Whole Black Catalogue,” whose title riffed on The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968), one of the era’s most...
