Category: Current auction

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 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.