Race
New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1974. First edition. Illustrated with figures and plates. Gray cloth lettered in red and black on the spine, orange endpapers. Unclipped dust jacket ($15.00) designed by Ronald Clyne, with rear-flap blurbs from Sir Peter Medawar, René Dubos, and Arthur R. Jensen. Jensen was at the center of the race and IQ controversy that followed his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article. Dedicated to C. P. Blacker, Baker’s “lifelong friend” and longtime General Secretary of the Eugenics Society. From the library of L. John Wood (1930–2026), Indianapolis attorney, chairman of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission (1970–76), longtime Indiana ACLU board member and national ACLU board member (1968–73), and counsel to the Indianapolis Public Schools board during the remedy phase of the city’s federal desegregation case. It carries his characteristic reading note on the rear free endpaper: “13 April 1974,” the date he finished the book, here followed by his code “LUA.” Book clean and tight, with light wear to the spine ends and corners. Jacket with chipping and small losses at the spine head and along the upper edge of the front panel, rubbing, and toning and light soiling to the flaps and inner surfaces. Baker (1900–1984) was an Oxford cytologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of the British Eugenics Society from the 1920s. He called Race his life’s work. In it he classified human races as zoological subspecies and ranked populations by their capacity for “civilization.” It drew sharp criticism when it appeared, most fully in A. O. Ladimeji’s 1974 review in Race & Class, which found that many of its claims were already refuted by existing evidence. Historian Michael Kenny traces its influence on later hereditarian works such as The Bell Curve. Important for collections documenting the history of scientific racism and the eugenics movement.
First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good / Very Good. Item #UB-51693
ISBN: 0192129546
Price: $60.00