First edition book: Roll, Jordan, Roll by Julia Peterkin, featuring 71 full-page gravure photographs by Doris Ulmann. First edition, first printing. NY: Robert O. Ballou, 1933. Hardcover bound in finely woven dark blue cloth stamped brightly in gilt on the spine, with scarce first-issue dust jacket (with "$3.50" price on flaps and rear panel advertising seven titles), 6.25 x 8.75, 251 pages. Book condition: VG+/VG, with an ownership inscription to first free end page and light soiling to the jacket.
One of the great documentary photographic books of the 1930s, Roll, Jordan, Roll examines the lives of black plantation workers in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. The idea for the book was originally conceived by American photographer Doris Ullman, who met Julia Peterkin at a literary gathering in 1929—the same year Ullman had undertaken a project to create a volume of photographic studies of African Americans throughout the South. Ulmann's portraits of the Gullah people were taken on the Lang Syne plantation, owned by the family of Peterkin's husband; paired with text and stories written by Peterkin, Ullman's portraits of the former slaves and their descendants have long been praised for both their quality, and the sense of dignity they convey.
