中文物件研究报告｜Annie Straith Jamieson《William King: Friend and Champion of Slaves》（Missions of Evangelism, Toronto｜Copyright Canada 1925｜原版书衣尚在｜加拿大黑人史第一手传记）

The 1925 biography of William King, in its original Toronto printing and still wearing the dust jacket it was issued in — buff paper printed in green over red cloth lettered in black. Jackets of that date counted as packaging, and most went out with the string the parcel came tied in, so on a book of this age the wrapper is what separates an ordinary survivor from a collector's copy.

The imprint repays a moment's thought as well. The publisher was not a trade house but a Toronto missionary society, working from an office in the Confederation Life Building — the sort of body that put a book into print because it believed the story needed telling, not because it expected to shift many. Books issued that way were seldom printed in quantity, which is much of why the title is scarce now.

And the story did need telling. King came to abolition the hard way: an Irish-born minister who taught school in Louisiana, married into a planter family, and found himself by inheritance the owner of fifteen people. Rather than leave them within reach of the slave-catchers he took all fifteen north with him to Canada in 1849, and with them founded the Elgin Settlement at Buxton — nine thousand acres near Chatham, a terminus of the Underground Railroad, and by the 1860s a community of two thousand whose school was so well taught that white farmers nearby asked to send their own children.

Jamieson was writing within living memory of all this, able still to put her questions to people who had known him — testimony gathered while the witnesses were alive rather than history reassembled later out of paper, which is why it is still cited, and why the Schomburg Center in New York keeps a copy.

A first-hand account of one of the more remarkable communities in Canadian history, in the printing that carried it into the world.