At Sotheby's on Nov. 22: The John Golden Library: Book Illustration in the Age of Scientific Discovery

Sotheby’s has announced a live-auction sale at noon on November 22 of The John Golden Library: Book Illustration in the Age of Scientific Discovery. A full public exhibition of the Library will be held at Sotheby’s York Avenue from November 19-21.

An emeritus—but not fully retired—executive of a family-owned packaging and printing company, John Golden began his journey as a book collector with his discovery of the superlative papers and printing techniques of earlier centuries. Initially seeking inspiration for his work at Stephen Gould Corporation, an international leader in innovative and custom packaging and branding, Golden soon developed an appreciation for the primary publications of the age of enlightenment. Over the course of nearly four decades Golden meticulously collected a superb library, compact and cohesive, representing the very apex of book illustration in the golden age of scientific discovery. An avid and accomplished sailor, Golden gathered a significant sub-collection of pilot books as well.

Virtually every aspect of human investigation of the natural world from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries is illuminated in the Golden collection, from the constellations in the heavens to the shells of the mollusks in the depths of the sea. Botany, ornithology, and zoology—navigation, exploration, and travel—medicine, agriculture, and gardening—cartography, ethnology, dendrology, and lepidopterology—all are represented by splendid examples of some of the most significant works in the field.

The roster of artists represented in the library is just as remarkable as its range of subject: John James Audubon, universally regarded as the greatest of all bird painters; Pierre-Joseph Redouté, “the Raphael of Flowers”; Georg Dionysius Ehret, who combined botany and artistry more successfully than anyone else in the eighteenth century; Maria Sybylla Merian, the first European woman to travel to South America on an independent scientific expedition; Ferdinand Bauer, who died in anonymity, but is now recognized as the most exacting botanical draughtsman who ever lived; Joseph Wolf, described by Daniel Giraud Elliot as wielding a “magical pencil … devoted to scientific illustration”; and many others of equal renown, including Franz Michael Regenfuss, Karl Bodmer, Nicolas Robert, Abraham Bosse, Charles Bird King, Priscilla Susan Bury, Alexander Wilson, and Mark Catesby.

The books in the Golden Library also provide a master class in the method and execution of book illustration from simple woodcuts to the most sophisticated etching and engraving processes, often enhanced with stipple, aquatint, mezzotint, and, in the case of the Merian Rupsen Begin, counterproof impressions. The later age of scientific discovery saw the invention and refinement of lithography, and most of the nineteenth-century works are illustrated by this technique, including the great American ornithological works by Audubon and Elliot. The Golden Library also demonstrates a full range of coloring techniques: several methods of color-printing; coloring by hand, sometimes accomplished by artists intimately involved with the creation of the plates and sometimes heightened with gum arabic, silver, and gold.

A final component of the John Golden Library deserves recognition as well: the distinguished provenance of so many of the books. The library is built of copies from many of the most celebrated single-owner book auctions of the last four decades: Robert de Belder, H. Bradley Martin, Estelle Doheny, Peter Jay Sharp, Nicolas Von Hoffman, Frank S. Streeter, Laird U. Park, George M. Pflaumer, William Foyle, Árpád Plesch, Michael J. Kuse, Lord Wardington, Jacques Levy, and Frederick, 2nd Lord Hesketh.

Significance of the work; excellence of the artists and artisans; superlative condition; and celebrated provenance—when these elements are combined, as they are in the books in the Golden Library, collectors are presented with opportunities infrequently met with today.

Representative of the many treasures in the Library that demonstrate all of these qualities are the George Pflaumer copy, in contemporary dark red morocco gilt, of the 1754 edition of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands ($180,000-250,000), as well as a fine copy in contemporary binding of Catesby’s scarce 1767 Hortus Europae Americanus: or, A Collection of 85 Curious Trees and Shrubs, the Produce of North America ($40,000-60,000); the first complete and first Dutch edition of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Der Rupsen Begin, voedzel en Wonderbaare Verandering, containing 150 engraved plates printed in counterproof and handcolored, probably by Merian and her daughters ($150,000-250,000); an astonishing copy of Thornton’s Temple of Flora in contemporary English straight-grain green morocco gilt from the collection of the Papal Countess Estelle Doheny ($150,000-250,000); the Robert de Belder-Peter Jay Sharp copy of Priscilla Susan Bury’s Selection of Hexandrian Plants, belonging to the Natural Orders Amaryllidae and Liliaceae ($70,000-100,000); the most beautiful ornithological work produced in the United States, D. G. Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasianidae, or Family of the Pheasants, bound from the original parts and illustrated by 79 extraordinary handcolored lithographed plates by Joseph Smit and J. G. Keulemans after the brilliant Joseph Wolf ($70,000-100,000); an autograph manuscript, 1795, with thirty-nine original watercolor drawings, by the pteridologist James Bolton titled “New Figures of All the British Ferns” ($30,000-50,000); among many exceptional shell books, Auserlesne Schnecken, Muscheln und andere Schaalthiere / Choix de coquillages et des crustacés peints d'après nature (Copenhagen, 1758) with twelve plates by and after Franz Michael Regenfuss and beautifully colored by his wife ($35,000-50,000); and—to conclude with the ultimate example of desirable provenance for a botanical book—the Mackenzie-Horticultural Society of New York-de Belder-Von Hoffmann copy of one of twenty-five handcolored copies of Aylmer Bourke Lambert’s Description of the Genus Pinus, with 47 engraved plates mostly after Ferdinand Bauer, bound in contemporary russia by Staggemeier, with his ticket ($50,000-70,000).