USIANA

Our November 9 auction brings together 200 lots spanning an exceptionally broad sweep of American and British material, with a particularly strong concentration of Rhode Island local history — city directories, church records, genealogies, colonial town documents, regimental histories, and architectural studies that together form a remarkable research archive for the region. Highlights in this area include an 1844 Providence imprint of Might and Right, the anonymous account of the Dorr Rebellion; an 1835 memoir with Rhode Island imprint; early Pawtucket and Newport histories with heliotype and lithograph plates; and a fine copy of the 1897 Men of Progress with biographical portraits of the state’s leading figures. Beyond Rhode Island, the auction ranges confidently into American history and technology, with United States Census volumes from 1860–1864 in period leather bindings, a vivid 1855 railroad travel narrative illustrated in publisher’s cloth, a scarce 1816 American edition of Valuable Secrets in Arts, Trades, &c., and an Ernie Pyle scrapbook compiled from wartime newspaper clippings at the moment of his death on Ie Shima. Collectors of illustrated books and decorative bindings will find much to admire as well, from Doré-illustrated travel writing and a leporello viewbook of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial to a New York legislative manual bound in gilt-tooled red morocco presentation binding, a miniature olive wood New Testament, and a lively run of trade and technical manuals covering subjects from fish-breeding and blow-pipe mineralogy to paper-hanging, dynamo-building, and early motoring.

Our November 12 auction presents 240 lots spanning nearly five centuries of printed culture, from leather-bound eighteenth-century classics and Victorian periodicals to mid-century scientific monographs and contemporary graphic novels. Psychology and medical literature feature with particular depth, ranging from Samuel Beck's Rorschach volumes and Anna Freud's writings to scarce French neurological texts and inscribed neurosurgery books bearing the bookplate of Dr. William H. Sweet, while the humanities are represented by six French-language Samuel Beckett paperbacks from Les Éditions de Minuit, a 1901 Kipling Kim in illustrated boards, and a 1965 City Lights Pocket Poets Picasso. Collectors of Americana will find the 1886 second volume of Grant's Personal Memoirs complete with its Shenandoah Valley campaign map, Connecticut Civil War service records, and a rare 1912 Bowdoin College Ivy Day program with original advertisements, alongside G. H. Hollister's 1855 History of Connecticut in its original cloth. Graphic arts, bibliography, and the history of the book are well served by Denis Woodfield's Surreptitious Printing in England 1550–1640, Fraenkel's Decorative Music Title Pages for Dover, and a 1937 French printing-arts magazine, Les Arts et Techniques Graphiques, making this a sale of genuine range and scholarly substance.