November 12 Samuel Beckett, Freud, Grant’s Memoirs & Surreptitious Printing: Rare Books, Periodicals & Ephemera

Our November 12 auction presents 240 lots spanning nearly five centuries of printed culture, from leather-bound eighteenth-century classics and Victorian periodicals to mid-century scientific monographs and contemporary graphic novels. Psychology and medical literature feature with particular depth, ranging from Samuel Beck's Rorschach volumes and Anna Freud's writings to scarce French neurological texts and inscribed neurosurgery books bearing the bookplate of Dr. William H. Sweet, while the humanities are represented by six French-language Samuel Beckett paperbacks from Les Éditions de Minuit, a 1901 Kipling Kim in illustrated boards, and a 1965 City Lights Pocket Poets Picasso. Collectors of Americana will find the 1886 second volume of Grant's Personal Memoirs complete with its Shenandoah Valley campaign map, Connecticut Civil War service records, and a rare 1912 Bowdoin College Ivy Day program with original advertisements, alongside G. H. Hollister's 1855 History of Connecticut in its original cloth. Graphic arts, bibliography, and the history of the book are well served by Denis Woodfield's Surreptitious Printing in England 1550–1640, Fraenkel's Decorative Music Title Pages for Dover, and a 1937 French printing-arts magazine, Les Arts et Techniques Graphiques, making this a sale of genuine range and scholarly substance.