Mr. W. Paul Coates
Mr. W. Paul Coates is the founder and director of Black Classic Press, which specializes in republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent, and BCP Digital Printing, which produces books and documents using digital print technology. BCP Digital Printing is the only African-American owned book printing company in the United States.
Paul Coates formerly owned and operated “The Black Book,” a Baltimore-based bookstore. His experience with the purchase, sale, collection, and publishing of books by and about Blacks, is a love affair that has continued for more than fifty years. Coates and colleagues organized a “The Collectors Conference” at Howard University in 1983. The conference remains a singular event, bringing together book lovers and scholars in acknowledgement of the active and key role bibliophiles and collectors assumed in documenting the Black past.
Paul Coates formerly served as an African American Studies reference and acquisition librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. He is a graduate of Atlanta University (M.S.L.S.), and Sojourner-Douglass College. A former member and Maryland state coordinator of the Black Panther Party, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Black Panther Party Archives at Howard University. Paul is co-editor of Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History (1990). This volume of edited papers resulted from the Black Bibliophiles Symposium of 1983.
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