Factum Factorum

[New York: Haven Press, 1947. Very good.. 190pp., plus four pages of photographic portraits preceding the text. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt. Minor rubbing and spotting to boards. Text lightly toned but clean. A scarce collection of poetry and prose by Frank B. Coffin of Little Rock, Arkansas. Coffin, an African-American pharmacist and poet, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, earned his pharmacist's diploma at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, and spent the rest of his life as one of the first Black pharmacists in Little Rock. Two books of his poems were published during his life -- Coffin's Poems With Ajax' Ordeals published in 1897 and this book, published fifty years later. Both volumes are difficult to find, so we are not sure how much of the material in the present work appeared in some form in the earlier book. We notice that Ajax, who shows up in the title of the first book, appears in the title of sixteen poems in this later book. Other intriguing titles in the present work include "Phyllis Wheatley," "Harriet Beecher Stowe," "Lincoln's Call," "Retribution," "'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'" "Woman," "Racial Facts," "America's Needed Facts," "Hitler," and "Hell on Earth." Coffin is a forceful writer whose pieces often rail against racial injustice and other social ills in America; for example, in his short prose piece, "America's Disgrace," he lambasts the "shame" of the present Congress in not handling the current slate of "the worst disorders of our civilization," which he lists as "Lynching, race prejudice and hatred, sexual diseases, kidnapping, homicide, suicide, robbery and the rum traffic.