Category: Past auctions

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.

Spanning nearly three centuries of print culture, this sale of 500 lots draws together an admirably diverse range of Americana, ephemera, and printed curiosities that will reward collectors across a wide spectrum of interests. Judaica is well represented, from the Vienna-printed Mikraot Gedolot Chumash and Saul Raskin’s etched Pirke Aboth to mid-century publications from The Jewish Publication Society, while New England local history surfaces throughout in Maine fisheries pamphlets, Portland Observatory keepsakes, a Clipper Ship master’s biography, and an 1888 pictorial tour of Washington, D.C. with original publisher’s cloth. Among the more distinctive offerings are Howard Pyle’s 1908 illustrated Ruby of Kishmoor, the Matisse Jazz art book, an Ansel Adams-illustrated 1945 issue of the literary journal Twice a Year, a self-published 1991 artist’s book from the Haystack School in Maine, and a handsome 1923 Tiranti quarto on the architectural designs of Abraham Swan. Genealogists will find Tuttle, Miller, and St. John family histories alongside New Jersey Jewish community records, while ephemera enthusiasts can pursue a 1961 Hartford Times heralding Yuri Gagarin’s flight, 1925 Brunswick record catalogs, Rawleigh’s 1938 almanac, vintage Esso road maps, and a curious rustic wooden plaque from the Portland Observatory bearing a Longfellow quotation — the whole forming a sale that reflects the pleasingly unpredictable accumulation of a well-read, widely traveled collecting life.

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.