John Davenport is Head of Special Collections in the O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library of the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota). The Department of Special Collections houses the University of St. Thomas Archives and a number of rare book collections (the Celtic Collection, the Luxembourg Collection, and the Chesterton-Belloc Collection of first editions), together some 1,200 linear feet of documents and 13,000 volumes of rare book material. The Department staff also includes Special Collections Librarian James Kellen.

Three texts (each a broadside related to the slave economy of the antebellum Virginia) are presented here as a part of file of documents that were produced in course 16, Introduction to Electronic Texts, of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia (July, 1995). These texts also are available as a part of the collections of the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center (Modern English Literature Collection).