Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature . By Bryan Sinche

True to his title, in Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Bryan Sinche examines a phenomenon in Black print culture that has not previously received its due. While many African American authors of the 19th century served as their own publishers, Sinche argues that their texts remain an understudied contingent in both African American literary and book history. Taking a bibliographic approach to cultural history, Sinche models methodologies for integrating textual studies into the analysis of early African American literature, building on previous edited collections such as Early African American Print Culture (2012) and Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (2019). Though the research grounding this book predates the public launch of the American Antiquarian Society's Black Self-Publishing website or the Black Bibliography Project, Sinche's sense of indebtedness to scholars of Black bibliography shapes his book's ambition to reconstruct a print culture extant case study by extant case study. Published by the Author benefits from the fact that its author personally examined at least one physical copy of each text in his study and more than 125 copies in total. It is a strength of Sinche's project that he pays such close attention to the physicality of each text he analyzes, while “not treating format as determinative,” making this project useful for scholars of material texts, intellectual history, and literature alike (20).Sinche argues that, by serving as their own publishers, Black authors were able to use “white” print infrastructures to advance individual and collective goals of self-representation. Sinche thus tracks self-determination as an editorial principle and a politics among Black authors of the 19th century, highlighting how they conceptualized their own print. For Black authors, the self-published text often proved “everything but a book to be read,” as African Americans used and sold print matter to fundraise for humanitarian causes, to support themselves and their families, to facilitate travel, to document their intellectual and institutional histories, and to record personal narratives (191). Black self-publishers of the 19th century often pitched regional or institutional audiences rather than seeking mass national appeal or exposure. Because Sinche focuses on local print markets and publishing scenes, Published by the Author decenters our account of early African American authorship away from well-known 19th-century figures toward an emphasis on Black print culture as a shared practice joining together various regions.The first half of Published by the Author groups texts by their formal or generic qualities. Chapter 1 unpacks the supplicant text, or “a publication that announces its author's need for economic support and is offered in exchange for that support,” as a genre commonly used by Black author-publishers (38). In Chapter 1 Sinche argues that because the supplicant text is a book that can be sold, it empowers the author to transform their supplication into an act of self-determination. Chapter 2 addresses most explicitly Black publishing in New England, looking at how the American market for antislavery literature often relied on white amanuenses and editors for Black authors, as opposed to Black self-publishers, who “helped broaden the mantle of abolitionism and foreground Black labor in the antislavery struggle” (66). By focusing on self-published autobiographies of fugitives and abolitionists, Sinche situates these books in a larger Black activist print culture, framing self-publication as a means to represent “their own antislavery work” as African Americans (89). Chapter 3 summarizes how self-publishers rewrote American history from Black perspectives, modeling how “the work of rewriting American history was also the work of rewriting itself” (92). Such authors relied on “the primacy of first-person experience as a means of knowing” to contest national narratives shaped by white supremacy and colonialist imperatives (95).The second half of Published by the Author groups texts by their function for the author. Chapter 4 engages self-publication as a means for documenting and circulating “alternate testimony” for Black authors to craft archives of their own stories that could offer counternarratives to legal action against them (119). These authors position themselves as legal analysts who recognize the precarity of their own American citizenship and the curtailed exercise of their rights, often connecting this self-representation to a critique of the U.S. judicial system. Though Sinche presents the legal resonances for “testimony” as a priority for these Black self-publishers, the chapter would have been rounded out by an engagement with the genealogies of testimony in Afro-Protestant traditions. Chapter 5 supplies part of this conceptual lineage by studying Black clergy who self-published books, using their autobiographical storytelling to narrate a collective identity or position occupied by Black religious communities. These self-published texts by men and women of the cloth illustrate an “institutional focus of the autobiography” that can be traced in 19th-century African American literature more broadly (151). Chapter 6 drives home the intertwining of economic agency with editorial agency for author-publishers. Discussions of format and itinerancy are key to this chapter, such as when Sinche notes that self-publishers often focused on the marketability of their books, using the format, layout, and binding as an advertisement to entice potential readers to become buyers. The circuits of itinerant Black booksellers anchor Sinche's coda, which frames “Black author-publishers working outside of the mainstream print market” as “purveyors of what might be called the walking book” (196). The trope of the walking book provides occasion for Sinche to underline the project's commitment to “illustrate the agency and action of everyday Black Americans” in print culture and circulation (199).Case study by case study, Sinche reassembles the economic, creative, and political imperatives that Black author-publishers faced in the 19th-century United States. At moments the book struggles to land on an argumentative throughline that ties together its authors or chapters beyond the fact of self-publication–a feature that is perhaps a hazard of the bibliographic ambition of its study–but the project's significance overshadows this occasional awkwardness. Across Published by the Author, Sinche recovers the Black author-publisher as a key figure in African American literary and book history.