USIANA

This auction of 200 lots ranges from eighteenth-century encyclopaedias and finely bound classics to mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and ephemera, reflecting the breadth of a well-read and visually attentive collecting tradition. Among the most distinguished offerings are a 1798 Philadelphia Dobson Encyclopaedia in full gilt-ruled calf, a rare 1858 regional imprint from Ogdensburgh in full blind-stamped cloth, and Lingard’s fourteen-volume History of England in contemporary half calf with provenance bookplates — alongside Zaehnsdorf-bound Trevelyan and a handsome Skira Gauguin monograph with tipped-in colour plates and original slipcase. Photography is exceptionally well represented, with significant lots devoted to the Farm Security Administration (Stryker and Wood’s In This Proud Land), Emil Schulthess’s gravure-illustrated China and Antarctica, Wright Morris’s paired photobooks, Gordon Parks, Peter Magubane, and a strong run of exhibition catalogues and monographs spanning documentary, landscape, and photojournalistic traditions from the 1930s through the 1990s. French illustrated books and classical texts appear throughout, including parallel Greek-French editions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Hymnes in original printed wrappers, while manuscript ephemera — an 1851 engraved Whytock & Co. invoice and an 1853 McIntosh bookseller’s billhead with manuscript entries — add documentary texture to the sale. Rounding out the catalogue are collections of vintage paperbacks, advance reading copies, travel literature, Soviet history, and American presidential biography, making this a sale suited to specialist and general collectors alike.

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.