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This September auction brings together 200 lots spanning four centuries of printing and collecting, with particular depth in American history, architecture, and the literature of New England — Connecticut and Maine figure prominently throughout, from the 1889 official Record of Service of Connecticut Men in the Army and Navy to a richly assembled run of Maine local histories, educational publications, and trade imprints. Architecture commands an unusually large share of the catalogue, with illustrated guides, exhibition catalogues, and technical references ranging from Georgian country houses to mid-century skyscraper engineering, while a separate thread of fine and decorative printing runs through lots such as the Stinehour Press Morison and Updike correspondence, Copley’s 1877 calligraphy alphabet plates, and a Robinson-Pforzheimer type-specimen broadside from the New York Public Library. Among the more singular offerings are a first edition of Peter Benchley’s Jaws with its original shark-motif cloth, an inscribed copy of Marcel Vertès’s It’s All Mental with a foreword by Anita Loos, a 1769 London printing of Sterne’s Sermons of Mr. Yorick in contemporary full calf, H. G. Wells’s 1931 Time Machine illustrated and designed by W. A. Dwiggins, and George Ade’s signed limited edition history of the American saloon — all setting the tone for a sale that rewards the generalist and the specialist in equal measure.

 

This September sale brings together 199 lots drawn from a distinguished private art reference library, spanning modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, design history, and the decorative arts — a breadth that will appeal equally to the specialist collector and the working art historian. The anchor of the sale is a deep run of monographs on twentieth-century masters, with particularly strong representation of Picasso, Chagall, Mondrian, Pollock, de Kooning, Modigliani, Klimt, and the Latin American modernists Kahlo, Tamayo, and Frida — complemented by focused groups on American Impressionism, the Wyeth dynasty, Stuart Davis, and the Photo-Realists. Among the more distinctive offerings are a large-square-folio Salvador Dalí (Abrams, 1968) in its striking metallic gold dust jacket, a Colin Eisler folio on Jacopo Bellini in publisher’s cloth, a complete set of Elliott Erwitt’s eighteen-booklet Italians in Movement boxed edition, and a run of four Easton Press series groups bound in full leather with extensive colour illustration. Architecture collectors will find focused material on Gaudí, Richard Meier, Kevin Roche, and Saarinen alongside volumes on Shaker design, English country house interiors, and French decorative arts, while photography is represented by monographs on Atget, Arbus, Strand, Winogrand, McCullin, and Robert Frank — making this a sale of genuine range and scholarly depth.