Category: Past auctions

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.

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.

Our September 13 auction presents 267 lots spanning three centuries of books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and ephemera, with particular strength in signed presidential and political material — from Richard Nixon’s inscribed memoir and George H. W. Bush’s signed letters to Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Spiro Agnew — alongside a remarkable run of signed astronaut titles including John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell that reads almost as a Who’s Who of the Space Age. Signed first editions by literary figures such as Michael Connelly, Dan Brown, Lee Child, Mary Higgins Clark, and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe complement rarer finds including a signed limited Clive Barker Hellraiser graphic novel (19 of 200 copies), an Alistair Cooke signed First Edition Society leather-bound volume, and a 1987 die-cut guestbook created for the yacht Trump Princess. New England local history receives thoughtful representation through early editions on Marblehead, Ashfield, Stonington, and Boston, while the graphic arts appear in Debret’s monumental Voyage Pittoresque au Brésil folio portfolio, a Samuel Prout engraving portfolio from the Continental Annual for 1832, and the Blaeu Novus Atlas Sinensis facsimile with fold-out maps of China and Japan. Photography collectors will find 19th-century cabinet cards and a quarter-plate ambrotype with Salem, Massachusetts provenance, and the auction rounds out with Civil War imprints, a rare first edition on horology by Edmund Beckett, and vintage horror magazine runs that speak to the breadth of tastes this sale is designed to serve.

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.