So even though there were readers/translators of Wheatley amongst French abolitionists, why aren’t there obvious surviving copies in institutions? English vs French language books? Protestant print in a Catholic country? The tumult of the 1780s/90s? Can anyone help me find find copies in France?

Roy also put me in touch w Gabriel Darriulat who works on Gregoire’s papers & personal library. I thought finally we will find the copy that Gregoire was working from for his translations. But no! Darriulat confirmed that at this time there is no evidence of a copy of *Poems* in Gregoire’s library.

By 1808 Abbé Henri Gregoire had translated (into French) and commented on Wheatley’s poems in his De la Littérature des Nègres. On conference trips to Paris in 2018 & ‘25, I searched library catalogs & asked around finding nothing! Michaël Roy, French scholar of AfAm lit confirmed he knew of none.

Thanks to our advisory board members for visioning, help, and ongoing review. And special thanks to editors of other digital censuses @zacharylesser.bsky.social of Shakespeare Census and Rob Carson of Marlowe census for both technical and bibliographical consultation!

If you have a copy near you, please send us information about it! We want to proliferate copy-specific data and you can tell us more about provenance, marginalia, bindings, and other copy-level data! Please share that and photos here: blog.wheatleycensus.org/2025/11/08/h...

The census has an accompanying blog for documentation, description, and sharing. The blog currently contains a mission statement, mapped data, and a form for sharing data about copies you work with. blog.wheatleycensus.org

Following the conventions of other digital censuses/enumerative bibliographies (Shakespeare, Marlowe - with whom we share underlying software) every book copy is assigned an enduring number, the WC#.

The census of the 1773 first edition currently lists 196 copies, and we believe this to be the first attempt to systematically locate and describe all surviving copies of this edition. www.wheatleycensus.org/issue/2/

The Census aims, eventually, to document every surviving copy of every edition of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (and closely related editions under different title) from 1773 to 1909. In 1909, the AME Book Concern published an edition, the first by an explicitly Black press.