USIANA

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.

Our October 12 sale brings together 203 lots spanning the breadth of antiquarian collecting, with particular depth in Oriental and imperial history, modern literature, and the illustrated book arts. Highlights include Schliemann’s first English edition of Troy and Its Remains (1875), the signed first edition of Princess Der Ling’s Son of Heaven with its vivid account of the Qing court, and S. Wells Williams’s revised Middle Kingdom in two volumes with its large folding map — all complemented by significant runs of Sino-British history from Bland and Backhouse, Mughal memoir in the Jahangirnama, and multiple Lawrence of Arabia studies from Graves and Storrs. Fine press and illustrated editions are well represented throughout, from the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte facsimile plates in Monuments of Egypt to Picasso-illustrated Lysistrata from the Heritage Press, Toulouse-Lautrec chromolithographs in disbound issues of Le Rire, and David Roberts’s hand-coloured Holy Land plates in facsimile folio. The sale also rewards collectors of signed and association copies — among them a presentation copy of Don’t Call It Frisco signed by Herb Caen, the Dore Schary copy of Caro’s The Power Broker, and an 1882 Macmillan Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with a contemporary manuscript inscription — alongside strong groups of Folio Society editions, Kipling, Virginia Woolf, and mid-century American first editions in dust jackets.