A characteristic piece of African-American popular culture, a dream book intended for players of the policy or numbers game popular in cities across the US from Chicago to New York. Three digit numbers were keyed to dreams and intended to be played for the daily game. Some contained additional tables of luck numbers for specific jackets (Eddie Arcano, 137), for Harlem occurrences (“To hear a man play the dozen, 912”) and past performance tables for numbers dating from 1931 to 1940. 

Ephemeral and cheaply printed, the books were sold a newsstand, candy stores, occult trinket shops and most anywhere else people would gather to buy daily sundries such as cigarettes etc.

While this collection is far from complete, we do feel it’s a good foundation for a broader study of twentieth century African-American urban life through the use of different marketing techniques.

We also feel that there is possible future deep research potential in urban job printing and commerce in general. 

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A note on duplicate titles:

While the “guts” of each book are usually pretty similar, we think the small variances in ads, size of publication, and graphics mark important differences in each example, once again opening up new avenues of research.