W.E.B. DuBois. 
 
Harcourt Brace & Howe: 1920. First edition. Hardcover. Octavo. Boards browned by time. Paint stain, as seen above, on the front board. Crown and heel of spine are wrinkled. Textblock lacks a little glue, and the gutter on the back endpapers is intact but scarred. A few of the pages have folds in the corners from dog ears. 276 pages. Good. 
 
DuBois pasted together autobiographical narrative, poetry, and spirituals he wrote into this forgotten classic. Fascinating twists and turns of this psychohistory of an intellectual include the reexamination of the problem of the color line and a proto-feminist celebration arguing why women should have economic independence. 
 
"Our great ethical question today is ... how may we justly distribute the world's goods to satisfy the necessary wants of the mass of men."