USIANA

Our October 1 sale presents 220 lots spanning illustrated books, fine photography, American ephemera, and vintage paper collectibles, with particular depth in a few areas that will reward specialists and general collectors alike. Leading the sale is an exceptional gathering of Walt Kelly's Pogo material — first editions, first printings, and scarce early Simon and Schuster paperbacks from the 1950s through the 1970s, including Songs of the Pogo and several Sunday compilation volumes — forming one of the more comprehensive Kelly offerings to appear at auction in recent years. Fine press collectors will find strong representation from the Limited Editions Club, with signed copies of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire illustrated by Al Hirschfeld, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera with lithographs by Mariette Lydis, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight among the highlights. Photography enthusiasts are well served by runs of Aperture, LensWork, and DoubleTake alongside vintage issues of Minicam and The Camera, rare early photographic satire in the 1894 Snap Shots with an Old Maid's Kodak, and rich documentation of Waterbury, Connecticut studio portraiture from the 1890s through the mid-twentieth century. Rounding out the sale are substantial runs of Massachusetts and Connecticut local history pamphlets, a scripophily archive encompassing mining, radio, cinema, and novelty corporate certificates — including Lena Horne Beauty Products stock — Waterbury regional advertising ephemera, and several lots of vintage postcards and vernacular photography that speak to the enduring appeal of American material culture.

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.