Category: Past auctions

Our October 22 auction presents 200 lots spanning an admirably broad range of collecting fields, from antiquarian pamphlets and private press rarities to modern first editions, ephemera, and the decorative arts. Among the highlights are a 1933 Cuala Press edition of Rossi’s Pilgrimage in the West, a complete woodcuts monograph on Dürer accompanied by exhibition catalogues, Skira’s tipped-in plate volume on Matisse, Munch, and Rouault, and three volumes of Forjaz’s Famílias Macaenses — a scarce genealogical record of Macau’s Portuguese families. Signed and inscribed copies appear throughout, including Updike’s A Month of Sundays and Problems, Mosley’s Gone Fishin’, Dalton’s Miguel Marmol, and Oates and Doctorow firsts, while García Márquez’s first American editions of Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold anchor a strong modern literature section. The auction also rewards specialists in typography and printing history, needlework and textile arts, New York City ephemera, Latvian displaced persons publications, early cinema and theatre programmes, and World War II rationing material, with curiosities ranging from a Kemble engraved chart of Columbus’s Atlantic voyages to a 1917 Ballet Intime promotional folder bearing photographs of Adolf Bolm and Roshanara.

Our October 19 auction presents 200 lots drawn from a pleasingly varied range of collecting interests, with particular strengths in Americana, British cultural history, illustrated books, and twentieth-century literature. The Lakeside Classics are well represented across multiple lots and periods, complemented by runs from the Britain in Pictures series and the Imprint Society, while students of fine press printing will note a facsimile of the Kelmscott Chaucer and a signed limited edition of Max Beerbohm’s Works numbered 121. Literary highlights include a first edition of Nelson Algren’s National Book Award-winning The Man with the Golden Arm in its dust jacket, three early James Baldwin titles, Aldous Huxley’s collected works from Chatto & Windus, and unbound production signatures for Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned — an unusual survival. Art and illustration are generously represented throughout, from loose chromolithographic design plates drawn from Dekorative Vorbilder and The Art Decorator to Peter Beard’s Longing for Darkness, Horst’s Photographs of a Decade, Heinrich Zimmer’s two-volume Art of Indian Asia in the Bollingen Series, and individual issues of the Paris satirical journal Le Rire featuring lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec and Vallotton.

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.