Category: Past auctions

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 September 28 sale brings together 200 lots spanning the full breadth of American life and letters, from early republic imprints and municipal law to Cold War photojournalism, Hollywood scandal, and mid-century fiction in its original pictorial wrappers. Americana collectors will find particular reward in a first edition of J. K. Paulding's 1818 verse epic *The Backwoodsman*, an 1821 American edition of Byron's *Don Juan* in printed boards, early Ohio and California government pamphlets, and a run of New York Chamber of Commerce commemorative volumes stretching from 1894 to 1908. Medical and legal history is well represented, with Pennsylvania Hospital annals, a full-calf Hippocrates and Galen, Homeopathy in America, and regional bar and law academy titles bearing handsome bookplates and period bindings. Among the illustrated highlights are a Rockwell Kent–decorated *Canterbury Tales*, Howard Pyle's *Robin Hood* in the Scribner Brandywine edition, the B. Altman architectural trade catalog in gilt cloth and slipcase, and Gordon Kahn's scarce paperback account of the Hollywood Ten. The sale rounds out with a signed Buzz Aldrin space collection, A. A. Milne's Pooh books in dust jackets, Upton Sinclair's *Cry for Justice*, and a broad sweep of vintage pulps, mass-market paperbacks, and periodicals that document American popular culture from the 1850s through the 1980s.

Our September 24 sale brings together 198 lots spanning an unusually wide and characterful range of collecting interests, from the radical press to the photographic annual, the industrial history of a single New England city to the broader currents of twentieth-century political thought. Photography occupies a commanding presence throughout, with substantial runs of Aperture magazine edited by Minor White — including monographic issues devoted to Edward Weston and featuring work by Lange, Stieglitz, and Dorothea Lange — alongside wartime and postwar issues of American Photography, The Complete Photographer, and more than forty volumes of Popular Photography annuals rich with mid-century color plates. Waterbury, Connecticut emerges as a distinct collecting thread of its own, represented by an 1898 Waterbury Watch Company repair manual, an 1855 manuscript pauper notice, brass industry archives, fraternal ribbons and medals dating to 1889, a c. 1920 Waterbury Clock Company alarm clock in its original factory box, and Homer Bassett's scarce 1889 photogravure survey Waterbury and Her Industries. Among the highlights of broader bibliographic interest are a first edition of Trotsky's Problems of the Chinese Revolution (Pioneer Publishers, 1932), a first edition of Borges's Labyrinths (New Directions, 1962) in dust jacket, Hockney's Cameraworks (Knopf, 1984), an early 1913 issue of Freud's Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse, a Roycroft Press Maud in limp suede, and a rare mimeographed 1967 Detroit imprint of Grace and James Boggs's The City is the Black Man's Land — the lot as

Our September 21 sale of two hundred lots draws together an exceptionally varied gathering of Americana and European printed culture, anchored by a substantial run of nineteenth-century American sheet music — from mid-century piano scores with lithographed covers bearing imprints of Firth, Pond & Co. and Wm. A. Pond & Co. to Sousa and Offenbach — alongside rich holdings in New York City history, Connecticut ephemera, and Judaica. Among the Judaica, three illustrated folios by Saul Raskin stand out: his Pirke Aboth (1940), Book of Psalms (1942), and Hagadah for Passover (1941), each with parallel Hebrew, Yiddish, and English text accompanied by full-page etchings, and all in publisher's original cloth. Collectors of illustrated art books will find strong material across several traditions, including the 1973 Braziller facsimile of The Rohan Master Book of Hours, Pope-Hennessy's Abbeville Donatello, and a working Dover camera-copy paste-up of the Posada folio that offers a rare glimpse into mid-century production archives. A set of bound Chase Brass & Copper Company newsletters documents Waterbury, Connecticut's industrial history, while a 1718 Comino Press Fracastoro and an 1800 two-volume Ovid with an Imperial Russian provenance binding stamped to Preobrazhensky officer Sergei Marin lend the sale a welcome depth of early printing and distinguished ownership history.

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.