USIANA

This autumn sale of 200 lots draws together an exceptionally wide-ranging selection of American and British books, periodicals, and ephemera spanning literature, architecture, exploration, art, and history, with particular depth in areas that reward the specialist and the general collector alike. Among the highlights are several Mark Twain subscription editions — including an 1875 Sketches and the Gilded Age — alongside signed and inscribed copies that carry genuine bibliographic weight, from Frederick Cook’s presentation copy of My Attainment of the Pole to August Derleth’s inscribed Sherlockian pastiches and a signed Carl Sandburg. Architecture enthusiasts will find a strong run of Frank Lloyd Wright monographs and a first edition of Ison’s Georgian Buildings of Bath in its dust jacket, while the literary periodicals — substantial runs of Encounter, Partisan Review, Dissent, and The American Mercury — document midcentury Anglo-American intellectual life with unusual completeness. Rounding out the sale are Victorian illustrated travel books, Pre-Raphaelite art catalogues, Burgess and Tolkien in early issues, Rachel Carson naturalist titles in original jackets, and a Folio Society set of Hodgkin’s Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire, making this a sale that moves fluently between the scholarly and the collectable.

Our October 8 auction presents 202 lots spanning an unusually broad sweep of collecting interests, from serious photographic literature to regional Americana, with particular depth in the history of photography periodicals. Students of the medium will find extensive runs of Aperture, LensWork, Camera Arts, and earlier titles such as American Photography, Photo-Era, and The Camera, offering a rare opportunity to acquire sustained archives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century photographic thought and practice in a single sale. The auction is equally notable for its concentration of Waterbury, Connecticut material — a coherent archive of regional ephemera encompassing obsolete currency, stampless covers, a circa-1850 daguerreotype broadside advertising E. S. Hayden’s studio, patent medicine labels from the Chief Two Moon Herb Company, payroll ledgers from Scovill Manufacturing, and concert programs documenting Pablo Casals performing at the Palace Theatre — forming a remarkably granular portrait of a New England industrial city across more than a century. Illustrated books are well represented throughout, including a T. Heath Robinson–illustrated Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Prang chromolithograph design plates, the first American edition of Helmut Newton’s Portraits, and a folio copy of Braun & Schneider’s Zur Geschichte der Kostüme with its full complement of hand-colored costume plates. Rounding out the sale are holdings in peace and Catholic Worker movement periodicals, Irish rebellion studies, economics, fine art catalogues, and an assortment of mid-century ephemera that rewards the generalist collector as much as the specialist.