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James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Photographs by Steve Schapiro

1250

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Edition: English
All the grief, grit, and unassailable dignity of the civil rights movement are evoked in this letterpress edition of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, illustrated with photographs by Steve Schapiro. Together, Baldwin’s frank account of the black experience and Schapiro’s vital images offer poetic and potent testimony to one of the most important struggles of American society.

Collector's Edition of 1,813 copies (No. 151–1,963), each printed in letterpress and signed by Steve Schapiro.

Winner of the 2017 Lucie Award, Book Publisher of the Year for a Limited Edition.
Edition of 1,813Hardcover in a slipcase, letterpress-printed text, two different paper stocks, and tip-ins9.4 x 13.4 in.5.67 lb272 pages
“So eloquent in its passion and so scorching in its candor that it is bound to unsettle any reader.”
The Atlantic Monthly
Sold Out
Please check with your nearest TASCHEN store just in case
XL
XL books are at least 34 cm (13.4 in.) high, with the exception of landscape-format titles
James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Photographs by Steve Schapiro

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Photographs by Steve Schapiro

1250

We Shall Overcome

A letterpress edition of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, with photographs by Steve Schapiro

First published in 1963, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America’s so-called “Negro problem.” As remarkable for its masterful prose as it is for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is considered one of the most passionate and influential explorations of 1960s race relations, weaving thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the “land of the free.”

Now, James Baldwin’s rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted in a letterpress edition with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders—including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith—and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma March.

Rounding out the edition are Schapiro’s stories from the field, a new introduction by civil rights legend and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, captions by Marcia Davis of The Washington Post, and an essay by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, who was with her brother James in Sierra Leone when he started to work on the story. The result is a remarkable visual and textual record of one of the most important and enduring struggles of the American experience.

Marking the year of the original publication of the book and Schapiro’s photographs, this Collector’s Edition of 1,813 numbered copies (No. 151–1,963) is printed in letterpress and signed by Steve Schapiro, featuring:
 
  • Silk-screened hardcover with an embossed paper case
  • Letterpress-printed text on a natural, uncoated paper
  • Facsimile reproductions of ephemera from the era.

Also available as three signed Art Editions of 50 copies each (No. 1–150), all with a signed photographic print.

Winner of the 2017 Lucie Award, Book Publisher of the Year for a Limited Edition, The Fire Next Time
.
The photographer

Steve Schapiro’s career as a freelance photojournalist started with a story on Arkansas migrant workers that made the cover of the The New York Times Magazine in 1961. Since then, his images have appeared in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. In the 1970s, he began a second career as a successful publicity stills and movie poster photographer, working on classic films such as Taxi Driver, The Way We Were, and The Godfather—which can be seen in The Godfather Family Album (TASCHEN, 2008). In 2016, he collaborated with Lawrence Schiller on a Barbra Streisand book (TASCHEN) and in 2017, his Civil Rights photographs were combined with the text of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (TASCHEN). He died in 2022.

The author

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era. His nonfiction collections, most notably Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), and novels, including Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in mid-20th-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France.

The contributing authors

Gloria Karefa-Smart was born Gloria Esther Baldwin in Harlem. She traveled widely with her brother James and is the literary executor of his estate. She has lived in Freetown, Sierra Leone; New York’s Upper West Side; and Washington, D.C., where she still resides, and is the mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of 22.

Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020) played a key role in the struggle to end segregation—as a Freedom Rider, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and an organizer of the March on Washington—and continued to serve as a prominent voice for social justice until the end of his life. He was the recipient of the Lincoln Medal, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Lifetime Achievement Award, and the NAACP Spingarn Medal, among many other honors.

Marcia Davis is the news editor of The Marshall Project. A native of St. Louis, she spent more than 20 years as an editor and writer at The Washington Post, where she helped lead the coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. She also worked at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and was senior editor of Emerge magazine.

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Photographs by Steve Schapiro
Edition of 1,813Hardcover in a slipcase, letterpress-printed text, two different paper stocks, and tip-ins24 x 34 cm2.57 kg272 pages

ISBN 978-3-8365-5103-8

Edition: English
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