USIANA

Our September 21 sale of two hundred lots draws together an exceptionally varied gathering of Americana and European printed culture, anchored by a substantial run of nineteenth-century American sheet music — from mid-century piano scores with lithographed covers bearing imprints of Firth, Pond & Co. and Wm. A. Pond & Co. to Sousa and Offenbach — alongside rich holdings in New York City history, Connecticut ephemera, and Judaica. Among the Judaica, three illustrated folios by Saul Raskin stand out: his Pirke Aboth (1940), Book of Psalms (1942), and Hagadah for Passover (1941), each with parallel Hebrew, Yiddish, and English text accompanied by full-page etchings, and all in publisher's original cloth. Collectors of illustrated art books will find strong material across several traditions, including the 1973 Braziller facsimile of The Rohan Master Book of Hours, Pope-Hennessy's Abbeville Donatello, and a working Dover camera-copy paste-up of the Posada folio that offers a rare glimpse into mid-century production archives. A set of bound Chase Brass & Copper Company newsletters documents Waterbury, Connecticut's industrial history, while a 1718 Comino Press Fracastoro and an 1800 two-volume Ovid with an Imperial Russian provenance binding stamped to Preobrazhensky officer Sergei Marin lend the sale a welcome depth of early printing and distinguished ownership history.

Spanning nearly three centuries of print culture, this sale of 294 lots draws together an admirably diverse range of Americana, ephemera, and printed curiosities that will reward collectors across a wide spectrum of interests. Judaica is well represented, from the Vienna-printed Mikraot Gedolot Chumash and Saul Raskin’s etched Pirke Aboth to mid-century publications from The Jewish Publication Society, while New England local history surfaces throughout in Maine fisheries pamphlets, Portland Observatory keepsakes, a Clipper Ship master’s biography, and an 1888 pictorial tour of Washington, D.C. with original publisher’s cloth. Among the more distinctive offerings are Howard Pyle’s 1908 illustrated Ruby of Kishmoor, the Matisse Jazz art book, an Ansel Adams-illustrated 1945 issue of the literary journal Twice a Year, a self-published 1991 artist’s book from the Haystack School in Maine, and a handsome 1923 Tiranti quarto on the architectural designs of Abraham Swan. Genealogists will find Tuttle, Miller, and St. John family histories alongside New Jersey Jewish community records, while ephemera enthusiasts can pursue a 1961 Hartford Times heralding Yuri Gagarin’s flight, 1925 Brunswick record catalogs, Rawleigh’s 1938 almanac, vintage Esso road maps, and a curious rustic wooden plaque from the Portland Observatory bearing a Longfellow quotation — the whole forming a sale that reflects the pleasingly unpredictable accumulation of a well-read, widely traveled collecting life.