USIANA

This September sale of 240 lots draws together an exceptionally varied gathering of Americana, medical history, natural science, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, with particular strength in the history of medicine and psychiatry — among the highlights are both volumes of William Hammond’s rare Quarterly Journal of Psychological Medicine, thirteen annual reports of the Northampton State Lunatic Hospital under Pliny Earle, and the three-volume set of Paris and Fonblanque’s Medical Jurisprudence of 1823. Collectors of Americana will find much to pursue, from Benjamin Trumbull’s 1797 History of Connecticut with its Amos Doolittle engraved map, to the scarce 1818 Philadelphia Directory with its illustrated advertisements, and the 1840 Strickland pamphlet on the proposed marble sarcophagus for Washington’s remains. The natural sciences are well represented by Coues’s government-printed Fur-Bearing Animals with its twenty plates, Darlington’s Flora Cestrica devoted to the botany of Chester County, and two volumes of Conversations on Mineralogy with hand-colored plates, while literary collectors will note the 1842 gift annual The Gift containing the first printing of Poe’s Eleonora, and Swinburne’s first edition A Note on Charlotte Brontë. Fine and decorative bindings appear throughout — from the elaborately gilt-stamped publisher’s calf of The Gift to the contemporary full leather of the 1793 Edinburgh Bible with its family register — and the sale as a whole reflects the broad, humanistic range of a nineteenth-century American library formed by a reader equally at home in the consulting room, the lecture hall, and the parlour.

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.