• Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A RUTH BADER GINSBURG BEADED JUDICIAL COLLAR. $80,000 - $120,000
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: ONLY KNOWN COPY OF THE ONLY BOOK BY THE REMARKABLE EVE ADAMS. $8,000 - $12,000
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A COMPLETE RUN OF VISIONAIRE MAGAZINE THROUGH 2010. $6,000 - $9,000
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: LAW REVIEW OFFPRINT SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY RUTH BADER GINSBURG. $3,000 - $5,000
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: META REBNER'S WORKING SCRIPT OF THE LOVED ONE. $1,500 - $2,000
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A KATHY GROVE PORTRAIT OF CYNDI LAUPER FOR THE FEBRUARY 1989 DETAILS COVER. $800 - $1,200
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A PLASTIC COAT BY MILLIE DAVID FEATURED IN SOHO NEWS STYLE SECTION, FROM THE COLLECTION OF ANNIE FLANDERS. $500 - $700
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A RUTH BADER GINSBURG JEWELRY BOX. $600 - $900
    Bonhams, Mar. 22 – Apr. 2: A SET OF JONI MITCHELL LYRICS FOR "IF I HAD A HEART." $2,000 - $3,000
  • Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: [RUTH, George Herman “Babe” (1895-1948)]. Signed photograph. Circa 1930s. 191 x 248 mm. $1,500 to $2,500.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: HARRISON, Benjamin. Document signed (“Benj Harrison”) as governor of Virginia, certifying the service of Daniel Cumbo, a Black Revolutionary soldier. $6,000 to $9,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: ONE OF THE FIRST PRINTED ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. $4,000 to $6,000.
    Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: FIRST PRINTING OF LINCOLN’S IMMORTAL GETTYSBURG ADDRESS. $4,000 to $6,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: HIGHLY IMPORTANT MORMON ARCHIVE. ALLEY, George. Archive of 23 Autograph Letters Signed by Mormon Convert George Alley to His Brother Joseph Alley. $10,000 to $20,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: [AVIATION]. [ARMSTRONG, Neil A.] Aviation Hall of Fame Gold Medal MS64 NGC, Awarded to Neil Armstrong in 1979. $2,000 to $3,000.
    Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: NEWLY DISCOVERED FIRST PRINTING OF "WITH MALICE TOWARDS NONE... " FROM THE ONLY NEWSPAPER ACTUALLY ALLOWED TO PARTICIPATE IN LINCOLN’S SECOND INAUGURAL PROCESSION. $4,000 to $8,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: THE MOST IMPORTANT GEORGE WASHINGTON DOCUMENT IN PRIVATE HANDS; GEORGE WASHINGTON’S COMMISSION AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, 1775, ONE OF ONLY TWO ORIGINALS. $150,000 to $250,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: A VERY RARE ACCOUNT OF BLACKBEARD’S DEATH AND ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PIRATE ITEMS EXTANT. $3,000 to $5,000.
    Potter & Potter Auctions
    How History Unfolds on Paper:
    Choice Selections from the Eric C. Caren Collection
    Part IX
    April 18, 2024
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: EDISON, Thomas. Patent for Edison’s Improvements on the Electric-Light, No. 219,628. [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Patent Office], 16 September 1879. $2,000 to $3,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: [VIETNAM WAR]. The original pen used by Secretary of State William P. Rogers to sign the Vietnam Peace Agreement, Paris, 27 January 1973. $10,000 to $15,000.
    Potter & Potter, Apr. 18: SONS OF LIBERTY FOUNDER COLONEL BARRÉ ANNOTATED TITLE-PAGE, “WHICH OUGHT TO ROUSE UP BRITISH ATTENTION”. $4,000 to $6,000.
  • Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: [Langland (William)]. The vision of Pierce Plowman, nowe the seconde time imprinted..., Roberte Crowley, 1550. £8,000 to £10,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: [Shakespeare (William)]. [Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies], second folio edition, [by Tho.Cotes, for Robert Allot], [1632]. £30,000 to £40,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Bible, Czech Biblia Bohemica, first complete Bible printed in the Czech vernacular, Prague, August 1488. £30,000 to £40,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: Shabthai Tzvi.- Collection of four printed and illustrated broadsides detailing the appearance, rise and fall of the false messiah, Shabthai Tzvi, Augsburg, 1666-67. £40,000 to £60,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Leaf from the Beauvais Missal, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on parchment, [Northern France (perhaps Beauvais or Amiens)], [fourteenth century (c.1310)]. £4,000 to £6,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Aubrey (John). [Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme], manuscript in English, Latin and Greek, [c. 1693]. £30,000 to £50,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: Byron (George Gordon Noel, Lord). Poems on Various Occasions, first edition, Harriet Maltby's copy, Newark, Printed by S. & J. Ridge, 1807. £30,000 to £40,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Tolkien (J.R.R.) The Hobbit, first edition, second impression with dust-jacket, 1937 [but 1938]. £7,000 to £10,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Blake (William).- Thornton (Robert John). The Pastorals of Virgil, 2 vol., engraved plates by William Blake, 1821. £8,000 to £12,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper
    28th March 2024
    Forum Mar. 28: America.- Mount (William J.) & Thomas Page. The English Pilot…, [bound with] The Fourth Book, describing The West Indies Navigation from Hudson's-Bay to the River Amazones, 1721. £20,000 to £30,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Oldfield (Henry Ambrose), Rajman Singh Chitrakar & others. An album of 160 photographs and 13 original artworks, (1833-1919), [c. 1850s-1880s]. £20,000 to £30,000.
    Forum Mar. 28: Audubon (John James) [and William MacGillivray]. Ornithological Biography…, 5 vol., first edition, presentation copy inscribed by Audubon, Edinburgh, 1831-49 [i.e. 1831-39]. £10,000 to £15,000.
  • 19th Century Shop
    Catalogue 198 just published
    19th Century Shop. Darwin and Wallace, first printing of the first paper on natural selection
    19th Century Shop. Shakespeare’s Poems, first collected edition
    19th Century Shop. Walt Whitman portrait inscribed with a Leaves of Grass poem
    19th Century Shop. Major Elizabeth Barrett Browning manuscript notebook
    19th Century Shop. Spock's Baby Book, original MS
    19th Century Shop. Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica, the great celestial atlas

Rare Book Monthly

Articles - April - 2014 Issue

Stephan Loewentheil founder of the 19th Century Shop: a 3-decade perspective and an exceptional catalog to Celebrate 30 Years in the Trade

Catalog No. 150:  Icons of Western Civilization

 

Catalogues tell stories, some complex and others simple.  Book catalogues, not so long ago, were all or mostly books.  Today, while books remain the bedrock of information transfer, they share the stage with manuscripts, maps, documents and photographs as over the decades precedence of appearance has increasingly trumped presentation and books, often early but often not the earliest introduction of an idea, have increasingly found themselves desired but not the most desirable.  For first references to seminal ideas manuscripts, letters, proof copies and photographs often if not always precede books.  If there are rules, they are conditional because our understanding and expectations adjust as we move back in time, our perception a changing Alice’s Looking Glass view. 

 

What we can expect to find in the 20th century is almost always fresh and complete, what we find from the 15th century more often manuscript or examples of early printing.  In between, however expressed or printed, the form is often less important than the ideas expressed, ideas that have themselves moved the world or signaled profound changes.  Once one is then freed from any specific form the pursuit of the iconic early or unique expression emerges as a logical way to understand and collect and this is where Catalogue 150 takes us – on a journey to and among Icons of Civilization.  It follows the ideas and in so doing leads us across a patchwork quilt of possibilities, equally comfortable with images, maps, books, and manuscripts.  And pursued to its logical end this is a form of collecting that changes as more information is gathered, an open ended pursuit of evolving perception.

 

Catalogues with great intentions are invariably the outcome of decades of experience.  I asked Stephan Loewentheil, the founder of the 19th Century Shop, to both look back and ahead.  At 64 he’s been collecting for 35 years, as a dealer selling for thirty and issuing on average 5 catalogs a year.  He has taken a path only occasionally seen, the trained lawyer who chooses not to practice, in his case initially to run a historical renovation project in Baltimore that later lead to a divided life, organizer/rebuilder by day and a committed book sleuth by night.  In time he and his wife Beth concluded he would try, for three years, to become a professional rare book dealer.  If it didn’t work out he would practice law.  Thirty years later his career is no longer pending confirmation.  If it was once the road less taken it has become the path by which he has excelled in a personally distinctive way, his interest in unearthing obscure bibliographic details leading to the acquisition of underappreciated rarities, seminal documents and early historic photographic images.

 

His more than three decades in the trade has seen the field of paper collectibles in flux as Internet awareness has increased what we know and often redefined collecting taste and methods.  “In the 1980s what we studied and sold was well understood.  Today we are continuously learning, unearthing new materials and new formats to be added to the great tradition of the book.  The process of and experience of change in the transmission of knowledge and collecting has affected the 19th Century Shop.  Simply stated, we are today refocused as the 19th Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop:  rare books, manuscripts, and photographs representing mankind’s greatest achievements.  The world is more focused on the crucial and the first and we have changed with it, expanding deeply into great manuscripts and photography.”

 

Deciding what is important is the life’s work of some of the greatest dealers:  the one hundred most influential books, the most important events, the earliest images that exist.  To put them into a catalogue also means you had to acquire them, looking for years and stepping ahead of others to reach these prizes one by one.  H. P. Kraus, the legendary New York book dealer did this several times and perhaps most memorably published Catalogue 185 that went so unappreciated virtually nothing sold for almost ten years.  Fabulous material doesn’t always catch the market’s immediate fancy.     

 

Choosing items from the tens of thousands acquired over a lifetime to be set aside for inclusion in a memorable catalogue to be presented years into the future, to we now know, celebrate thirty years in business and confirm his commitment to the collecting of important ideas and their earliest origins, this catalogue arrives at the very moment when the field now embraces seminal documents and works as the gold standard for important collections.  Catalogue 150 brings us up-to-date.  If Mr. Loewenthiel early perfected a vision of what a collection could be, with this 30th anniversary catalogue, he shows where his thinking is today.  And it’s remarkable: 

 

We are pleased to offer an unpublished Age of Discovery manuscript with otherwise unrecorded information by one of Columbus’s shipmates, the earliest known photograph of John D. Rockefeller, two exceptional copies of The Federalist, two of the greatest photographic publications of the 19th century (Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign and Russell’s The Great West), first editions of Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, signed photographs of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, and many others. We offer the icons of civilization from throughout history—the books, manuscripts, and photographs that represent mankind’s greatest achievements.”

 

Here are descriptions for the 10 items illustrated in this article:

 

Lot 4. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion (1887), first edition of this landmark of photography and technology. $120,000

 

Lot 14. (Christopher Columbus.) Important unpublished 1512 manuscript concerning the voyages to the New World by Columbus, Vespucci, and others. POR

 

Lot 22. The Federalist (1788), an exceptional copy of the first edition in original boards, signed by Roger Alden, whom George Washington entrusted with the original signed Constitution, $450,000


Lot 28. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (1896), first edition, presentation copy of the "Manifesto of Zionism" inscribed to Herzl's friend playwright Arthur Schnitzler. $160,000

 

Lot 60. Walt Whitman, Autograph manuscript comparing Leaves of Grass with works of Wordsworth and Bryant. $35,000

 

Lot 80. A. J. Russell, The Great West (1869), first edition, illustrated with 50 large-format albumen photographs documenting the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad and the land through which it ran. $325,000

 

Lot 88. Alexander Hamilton. Letter Concerning the Conduct and Character of John Adams (1800) "one of only a few copies printed for Hamilton as a private circular," one of the origins of the Hamilton-Burr duel, inscribed and signed by Hamilton. $70,000


Lot 122. Wernher von Braun, Signed drawing of a spaceship (1952), by the father of the American space program. $25,000

 

Lot 127. Emancipated Slaves albumen photograph (1863), one of the great American slavery photographs. $18,000

 

Lot 130. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), first edition of the Principia, "the greatest work in the history of science" (PMM), in an untouched contemporary binding. POR

 

What follows next is a downloadable version of this catalogue:

 

www.19thshop.com/catalogues  Download the complete catalogue.

 

The 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop

email: info@19thshop.com

 

Maryland
10400 Stevenson Road, Suite 100
Stevenson, MD 21153 USA

phone: (410) 602-3002
fax: (410) 602-3006

 

New York
446 Kent Avenue PH-A
Brooklyn, NY  11249  USA

phone: (347) 529-4534
fax: (347) 529-6779

Rare Book Monthly

  • Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Alken (Henry). Sporting Notions, first edition, T.McLean, 1832-33. £800 to £1,200.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Bardi (Lorenzo). Nuova Raccolta delle piu interessanti Vedute della Citta di Firenze…, Florence, Lorenzo Bardi, [c.1840]. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Crawfurd (John). Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava..., first edition, 1829. £1,000 to £1,500.
    Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Dawe (George, engraver). The Life of a Nobleman, first edition, Geo. Henderson, [c.1825]. £1,000 to £1,500.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: [Doyle (John)], "H.B.". Political Sketches &c., 10 vol. including The Descriptive Key to H.B., Thomas McLean, [1829-51]. £4,000 to £6,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Eben (Adolphus Christian Frederick, Baron von) and Nicolaus Heideloff. Modèles de l'Uniforme Militaire Adopté dans l'Armée Royale de Suède, Rudolph Ackerman, 1808. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Geissler (J.G.G.) and Friedrich Hempel. Mahlerische Darstellungen der Sitten, Gebrauche und Lustbarkeiten bey den Russischen, Tartarischen…, 4 parts in 1, Leipzig and Paris, [1804]. £1,000 to £1,500.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Hunt (Charles). Portraits of Winning Horses...of the Derby, Oaks, & St. Leger, from the Year 1842 to 1849…, Rock Brothers & Payne, 1849. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Kunike (Adolf Friedrich). Zwey hundert und sechzig Donau-Ansichten nach dem Laufe des Donaustromes…, Vienna, Leopold Grund, 1826. £3,000 to £5,000.
    Forum Auctions
    Colour Plate Books from the Library of Norman Bobins
    Part 2
    27th March 2024
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Lasinio (Carlo). [Matrimony], Florence, 1790. £1,500 to £2,000.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Reinhardt (Joseph). A Collection of Swiss Costumes, in Miniature, second English edition, James Goodwin, [1828]. £800 to £1,200.
    Forum Auctions, Mar. 27: Wengen (Gottfried Durst von). Die Öffentliche Maskerade Bamberg am Fastnachts-Montage 1833…, Bamberg, [1833]. £2,000 to £3,000.
  • Sotheby’s
    Modern First Editions
    Available for Immediate Purchase
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Winston Churchill. The Second World War. Set of First-Edition Volumes. 6,000 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: A.A. Milne, Ernest H. Shepard. A Collection of The Pooh Books. Set of First-Editions. 18,600 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Salvador Dalí, Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Finely Bound and Signed Limited Edition. 15,000 USD
    Sotheby’s
    Modern First Editions
    Available for Immediate Purchase
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Ian Fleming. Live and Let Die. First Edition. 9,500 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter Series. Finely Bound First Printing Set of Complete Series. 5,650 USD
    Sotheby’s, Available Now: Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms. First Edition, First Printing. 4,200 USD

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