A Choice of Weapons

New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Early printing (February 1966; First printing dates to November 1965). Hardcover [octavo] in printed dust jacket. Orange cloth with black lettering stamped to spine, orange endpapers. x, 274 pp. Very Good or better, with mild toning and shelfwear to edges, soiling to text block. Very Good jacket has light rubbing and soiling, with some mild wear to edges, most notably to crown of spine.. Early printing (date coded "B - Q", February 1966) of the memoirs of author, photographer, and civil rights activist Gordon Parks. This copy bears an ownership inscription from Charles V. Hamilton to front free endpaper as well as a warm gift inscription on the dedication page in green ink to Charles' wife Dona Hamilton, thanking them for a stay at the Parks family's White Plains home over Christmas, 1966.

Inscription reads, under the book's printed dedication:

and to Dona
a most merry
and thanks
for a wonderful
stay
Gordon
Christmas 66
White Plains

Gordon Parks, one of the 20th century's most prolific and influential photographers, met and began profiling a young Stokely Carmichael for one of his LIFE magazine reporting assignments in Fall 1966. At the time Carmichael was co-authoring the book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America with Charles V. Hamilton, and although only five shots were used in the resultant 1967 article ("The Whip of Black Power"), Parks spent half a year with Carmichael, shooting over 700 photos. Some show Carmichael and Hamilton in Oxford, PA around the time of this inscription, and it stands to bear that Parks and Hamilton spent a considerable amount of time together in this period of Carmichael and Hamilton's close collaboration.

(Parks, Stokely Carmichael and Black Power, Gordon Parks Foundation 2022).