Category: Past auctions

Our October 15 auction presents 200 lots spanning an exceptionally broad range of collecting interests, from American literary firsts and historical manuscripts to fine bindings, illustrated art books, and ephemera. Highlights among the literary offerings include a first edition of John Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal in dust jacket, the first volume of Grant’s Personal Memoirs in original publisher’s cloth, and a typewritten production script of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit — an uncommon piece of theatrical history. Bibliophiles will find much to consider in the fine press and binding department, with a two-volume Nonesuch Press Bible featuring engravings by Stephen Gooden, a Peter Maverick-engraved bookplate for the Erasmus Hall Library in a full calf binding, a handsomely bound inscribed copy of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Crusade for Pan-Europe, and Chagall’s Glasmalereien für Jerusalem with original color lithographs. The auction is further distinguished by strong holdings in American history and regional studies — including Connecticut tercentenary pamphlets, Massachusetts Historical Society proceedings, and works on Native American and Civil War history — alongside Judaica, Holocaust studies, astronomy, horology, California postcard collections, vintage greeting cards, and a Hermann Bollmann axonometric pictorial map of New York City, together reflecting the depth and variety that characterizes a well-seasoned general antiquarian sale.

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.

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.

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.

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.