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"I magine a boy living in the city of his birth and not knowing who was the most noted native painter!" (201), wrote Arturo Alfonso Schomburg four years before his premature death in 1938 in the essay "José Campeche, 1752–1809: A Puerto Rico Negro Painter." In this, his sole text devoted to a fellow national and one of his most intimate, Schomburg narrates the paradox that consumed a substantial part of his life, that in a racist society the hypervisibility of blackness leads to the invisibility of talent: "Today, we understand the silence and know the meaning of it all. In Puerto Rico there lived an artist whose color prevented him from receiving the full recognition and enjoying the fame his genius merited" ("José Campeche" 201). Presumably about a painter, "José Campeche" is ultimately about Schomburg's outrage that colonial regimes not only preclude Blacks from being seen by others but also impede Blacks from seeing themselves. Narrating himself through the life of a gifted if unheeded Afro-Puerto Rican painter, Schomburg reclaims his image and his right to belong by ensuring that "there is no gap between this image and the recognition of oneself" (Mbembe 14)—even if he already feared Campeche's fate may one day be his own.

Nearly nine decades after "José Campeche," however, Schomburg is still largely perceived as a bibliophile or "lover of books." This portrayal is, of course, not arbitrary. By 1926, the year he sold his archive of over 4,600 items to the New York Public Library, Schomburg was the world's most important collector of rare books and other print materials on the Black global experience (Report for 1926 71; Walrond 6). Schomburg at times even described the power and beauty of books such as Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first by an enslaved person in the United States, in sacred terms: "No professor … of English literature can pull off the halo" ("Racial Integrity" 8). His third wife, Elizabeth Green, would likewise attest to Schomburg's obsession with books. Reportedly, she gave him an ultimatum to remove the collection from their home because "there were … books all over the house, even in the bathroom" (Sinnette, Schomburg 87). Schomburg's desire to collect print...

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