Curating Toni Morrison's Random House List

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Toni Morrison was a senior trade editor at Random House. During her time there she commissioned around forty-seven titles, many of which were landmark publications in their day: fiction and memoir by African American women; autobiography and other writings by Angela Davis, Muhmmad Ali and Huey P. Newton; archival scrapbooks of African American history; literary anthologies of Black writing, landmark works in postcolonial theory and LGBT studies; even a cookbook, a tennis guide, and a medical manual. The significance of Morrison's publishing career is now receiving long overdue attention, for example in Charlotte Terrell's 2024 article in The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (ed. Wilson et al) and Dana Williams's book, Toni at Random (2025). An exhibition of Morrison's Random House archives opens at Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library in January 20207. This paper describes my current research and curatorial project at the British Library, where I am working with the North America curators there to create the first complete collection in the world of these highly significant and beautiful books. I'm also researching the British Library's collecting history of these items; conducting copy-specific research (for example in special collections at Harvard); creating the authoritative scholarly bibliography of the list; exploring the relationship between Morrison's edited books and her own fiction; and lobbying other major libraries in both the US and UK to curate these books as the rare and precious collection that they are. I'm working towards the publication of a short history of these books for a trade audience - the working title is The Making of Toni Morrison: The Ongoing Story of Her Random House Books. There's also a strong public engagement dimension to the project - for example through numerous talks this academic year, blog pieces for the British Library, and my Substack (coming soon!). You can follow the project on Instagram, where I'm posting about one book each week: @tonimorrisonslist.

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