• 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
  • 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

Rare Book Monthly

Articles - August - 2017 Issue

Collections can get Complicated

I’ve known for many years that book collecting, if it was ever only books, is rarely books alone today.  Book collecting was once a huge field that required decades of experience.  Today informational databases approach Einstein levels of volume and complexity providing clear pictures of rarity and value while selling databases such as Abe Books and Biblio show enormous availability.  The word rare has always been a general term but the best databases today show it item by item, selling sites to tell you how many are available and RBH to tell you what the market is saying it’s worth.  

 

As a practical matter as a collector of Hudson Valley material I’ve found increasing change, even volatility, in what has long been a gradually rising market.  More and better material continues coming out and to achieve good results while plebian material is losing ground.  Behind this activity it appears that dealers and book collectors are aging-out, recognizing it’s time to sell.  The effect is an increasingly tense flow of better and better collectible material that is prompting auction houses to require even better material and lower estimates to get into their rooms.  It’s noticeable and exciting.

 

As a collector, now 70 but soon enough 71, I understand my obligation to organize my collection of Hudson River Valley material in ways that will be understandable to the auction house, institutions or dealer that will sweep clean my Aegean Stables.  I love the acquisitions but understand that what is transparent and appealing to me will be, for the most part, a burden to others.

 

So I’m re-organizing this collection as a sale and have started with the assumption that the 5,000 items I have will be fitted into about three hundred lots.  To do it I’m giving myself until the end of August in 2018 to complete this work.  The auction house or dealer who takes this upon themselves, hopefully well into the future, will understand what they have as will my family.  This example of the emerging new collecting seems to naturally focus on deeper, narrower, more intense subjects.  Whether there’s a market for this remains to be seen but as a collector, it’s a beautiful experience.

 

So here are a few lots.  I may have eight hundred photographic postcards of the mid-Hudson Valley.  Most will be a single lot I think while about sixty-five, all disasters of one type or another, will be a separate and very appealing lot.

 

One room in our house contains only Joel Munsell printings.  Mr. Munsell was kind enough to document his output beginning in 1834 and continuing into the spring of 1871 and lists the number of copies printed for 990 of the 2,278 items he owned up to.  He published books, but was more important in the printing of short-lived and quickly forgotten pamphlets.  He also printed dealer catalogues.  I believe I have north of four hundred of his works.  This collection may in time help unravel two mysteries; why haven’t I been able to find examples of more of his works and, for the items known for which he has provided quantities printed, how do the quantities relate to appearances in libraries, at auction and online.  That research so far raises almost as many questions as it answers.  This collection which has been acquired item by item over fifteen years will be sold as a single lot without a reserve.  It is a compelling collection but only one lot.

 

Even as I’m looking [distantly] into the abyss I’m of course also still collecting and am grateful that my wife accepts my, to quote Groucho Marx approach, “hello I must be going.”  The impulse to collect increases with age, inevitably leading to the collector’s dying words, “I’ll take it!”  So of course I’m still buying.

 

For those that read my stories many know I have become enamored with Abraham Tomlinson, the Dutchess County insurance agent who acquired Revolutionary War material during the period 1840 to 1858.  He was not a collector but rather, in my opinion, an accumulator who once he had built his museum, marketed it to various New York libraries, and sold it to the Mercantile Library by if not before, 1860.  I have Tomlinson’s notes about what he was offering as well as Radford Curdy’s, the Dutchess County historian’s update seventy-five years later, to guide me and I now consider the possibility of pursuing pieces of his collection as they re-appear.  It sounds difficult but the task is made immeasurably easier by the fact that the material that passed through the hands of the Mercantile Library appears to have been stamped as a Tomlinson item.  Today that’s a no-no but I’m glad they did it.  Some of his material will certainly reappear if for no other reason than that he had so much and we now have sixty years of documented reappearances, about twenty at auction, dating to the 1940’s.

 

I also have paintings, both some somewhat important examples and many others that will resonate only with people very attached to the mid-Hudson Valley.  I frankly love these paintings, particularly the emotionally dark ones because the Ulster County I grew up in was dark.  Altogether I have about thirty of them.

 

And there are lithographs.  I really don’t know how many but I can spend hours looking at them one by one.

 

And water colors.  By absolutely a stroke of luck I was asked to look at a collection of 160 watercolors and drawings painted by - - - - -.  Two young men wanted to part with them for money and I paid $7,000.   This collection will someday be a single unreserved lot.  Mr. 0000 had an excellent eye for detail.  Mr. ----- had a canny eye which he used to great effect beginning in late 1848 and continuing into the final years of the 1850’s.  This is life in the Hudson Valley as he saw it, carefully detailed, a decade before photography would begin to be common.

 

And then there are Sanborn Atlases.  These generally large format books presented towns, cities and businesses [such as railroads] beginning in the 1870’s and continuing into the 1940’s.  These maps are so detailed they almost defy imagination.  I have perhaps a half dozen and would love to buy more.

 

So this is a piece of what I have collected.  It’s small piece but I’m simply getting under way.  How dealers or auction houses will feel about the material is difficult to guess.  In time, we’ll know.  For now, it’s simply a pleasure.

 

Rare Book Monthly

  • 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.

Article Search

Archived Articles

Ask Questions