… and what that data might tell about Wheatley, *Poems*, and curricular and collections priorities at both Black-centered and historically-white institutions. Congrats on presenting at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, Caleb!

My undergraduate research fellow Caleb worked all year with me on the @wheatleycensus.bsky.social! He became interested in a tricky and uneven data point: year of last institutional collection (the last time a particular copy of the first edition of *Poems* entered an institutional library)…

The census of the 1773 first edition hit 200 copies today! Thanks to our Undergraduate Research Fellow Caleb who located records of THREE copies at Hampton University’s Peabody special collection of African American and African diasporic materials! Welcome WC # 1394, 1396, & 1398!

New entry in the list of 1773 first editions: the copy at the University of St Andrews. This copy came to St Andrews in 1773 as a Stationer’s deposit library. Its bound with another book. And theres a fully digitized version of it! Check it out: www.wheatleycensus.org/wc/1392/

Today is the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Along with British East India Company Tea, the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects was among the cargo carried from London to Boston on The Dartmouth. Today, the Boston Tea Party museum displays WC #1234: www.wheatleycensus.org/wc/1234/

Today’s Wheatley Census mystery: are there really no copies of the 1773 first edition in France? Published in London in 1773 and distributed, in part, through Methodist networks of Selina Hastings, there are copies all over the UK. But none in France?

The Wheatley Census Number (WC #) is a unique and durable identifier assigned to each book (or fragment) recorded in the census. This enables *copy-specific citation* in scholarship, bookselling/provenance research, and anywhere identifying and citing at the individual copy level is needed.

Pleased to announce the Wheatley Census is ready for 1.0 public release! As detailed a census as possible (right now) of the first six editions - those printed in the 18th century - of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, is available here: www.wheatleycensus.org.