Sotheby’s: Bibliotheca Brookeriana will be coming into the rooms

On October 11, Sotheby’s will inaugurate a series of sales the likes of which, in terms of celebrity, magnitude, and value, has not been seen in the book world since the heady days of the Papal Countess Estelle Doheny and Henry Bradley Martin: Bibliotheca Brookeriana, the T. Kimball Brooker Library of Renaissance Books and Bindings. But while the Doheny and Martin libraries were notable for their eclecticism, ranging in the former case from fore-edge paintings to the Gutenberg Bible and, in the latter, from the Dunlap broadside to an Edward Lear watercolor of a Great Auk, Brooker’s collection is more tightly focused—carefully curated, in today’s parlance. In that respect, Bibliotheca Brookeriana is more reminiscent of two other, more recently auctioned libraries, those of Robert S Pirie and Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow, although it is much more extensive than either of those. It is probably safe to say that a library with the theme and concentration of Brooker’s has never before been assembled outside of Europe.

Brooker has balanced a busy and highly successful business career (he was President of Barbara Oil Company, which despite its name is an investment company, prior to which he had been a Managing Director of Morgan Stanley) with what was something more than an avocational interest in early printed books. He won the 1962 Senior Prize of the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes at Yale, where he received a bachelor's degree in French literature. A true scholar-collector, Brooker's theses for both his Harvard Business School MBA ("Rare Books as a Hedge against Devaluation and Inflation") and his University of Chicago MA in Art History ("The Diffusion of Binding Styles in the Sixteenth Century between Italy and France") dealt with the history of the book. Brooker went on to get a terminal degree in Art History; his doctoral dissertation was titled "Upright Works: The Emergence of the Vertical Library in the Sixteenth Century." (A full recitation of Brooker’s bibliophilic activity: philanthropy, exhibitions, and publications would require another article.)

After more than six decades of collecting by its founder, Bibliotheca Brookeriana is today a library of mostly French and Italian books of the sixteenth-century in their original bindings. Its crown jewel is an extensive group of Aldine press publications, which Brooker began collecting in earnest in the mid-1960s and which he has written about extensively. Numbering nearly 900 volumes—including Torresani and Colombel imprints, Lyonese contrafactions, unique reference materials, and books in duplicate and in variant states—it will be the largest collection of Aldines to come to the market in a century.

Among the library’s many treasures are ten Aldines from the libraries of Jean Grolier (two unrecorded by Austin), sixteen Aldines printed on vellum, and more than thirty Aldines on large, heavy, or blue paper. Also present are two extraordinary pen facsimiles on vellum of early Aldine editions, executed by the calligrapher Fyot for the collector Charles Chardin (1748–1826).4 Eighteen books were once in the collection of the press’s premier bibliographer, Antoine-Augustin Renouard.

Beyond the Aldine collection are some 450 other early printed books, including Robert Estienne, Dictionarium, seu Latinae linguae Thesaurus (Paris: Robert I Estienne, 1543); Dante, La Comedia (Venice: Francesco Marcolini for Alessandro Vellutello, 1544); Diogenes Laertius, Epistole Bruti Yppocratis medici ([Venice: Tommaso di Piasi? 1492]); Alexander Aphrodisiensis, Quaestiones naturales, morales et De fato (Venice: Girolamo Scoto, 1541); and Dionysius Halicarnassensis, Antiquitatum Romanarum (Treviso: Bernardinus Celerius, 24/25 February 1480).

Another segment of the library is devoted to art, architecture, and other illustrated books. A few of the more than 300 works represented here are Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachie ou Discours du songe de Poliphile (Paris: Louis Blaublom for Jacques Kerver, 1546); Luca Pacioli, Diuina proportione (Venice: Paganino I Paganino & Alessandro Paganino, 1509), which is bound with Euclides, Opera (Venice Paganino I Paganino & Alessandro Paganino, 1509); Vitruvius, De architectura libri dece traducti de latino in vulgare affigurati (Como: Gottardo da Ponte, 1521); and Geoffroy Tory, Champfleury. (Paris: Geoffroy Tory & Gilles de Gourmont, 1529).

Bare lists of books are never especially revealing, and this is especially true of Bibliotheca Brookeriana, where in most instances the binding (often decorated by medallions or plaquettes, impresa, mottoes, cyphers, the initials, or armorial insignia of an early owner) and provenance of the volumes are intrinsic to their appeal and value.

Apart from Grolier, a few of the other distinguished French provenances represented among Brooker's books are François I, Henri II, Marguerite de France, Anne de Montmorency, Thomas Mahieu, and Jacques-Auguste De Thou. The collection also features books bound in France for foreigners, among them Luigi Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, Marcus Fugger, and Thomas Wotton. As for Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the library contains eleven volumes bound for him as well as medals and portraits of the statesman and collector.

Cardinal Benedetto Accolti, Apollonio Filareto, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, and the Genoese collector Giovanni Battista Grimaldi feature among the notable Italian provenances, as do nine bindings fom the library formed by Bonaccorso Grino and members of the Pillone family and given fore-edge decoration by Cesare Vecellio.

Among the German bindings are volumes presented by Beatus Rhenanus to Veit Kopp and by Helius Eobanus Hessus to Joannes Alexander Brassicanus; there are Augsburg bindings for members of the Fugger family, Nuremberg bindings for Georg Römer family, seventeen Dresden bindings for Georg von Ebeleben and Nikolaus von Ebeleben, and a Prague binding for Ferdinand Hoffmann. Bibliotheca Brookeriana even includes a richly gilt Mexican binding of 1594—among the earliest examples of a New World gilt-tooled binding.

The library is rounded out by a small number of significant manuscripts, antiquarian bibliography, and, hearkening back to Brooker’s days in New Haven, an extensive collection of Molière.

Sotheby’s is putting the shoulder of its worldwide Books and Manuscripts Department to the Brooker wheel, with sales scheduled for New York, London, and Paris. The tentative schedule of sales is as follows:

I. 11 October 2023 (New York): An evening sale of representative highlights

II. 12 October 2023 (New York): The Aldine Collection, A–C

III. April 2024 (New York): The Aldine Collection, D–M

IV. July 2024 (London): Renaissance Books and Manuscripts, part 1

V. October 2024 (New York): The Aldine Collection, N–Z

VI. December 2024 (London): Renaissance Books and Manuscripts, part 2

VII. July 2025 (London): Renaissance Books and Manuscripts, part 3

VIII. 2025 (Paris): Molière

IX. 2025 (New York): Reference Library (online)

For further information, please contact in New York, Selby Kiffer (selby.kiffer@sothebys.com) or Kalika Sands (kalika.sands@sothebys.com) and in London, Charlotte Miller (charlotte.miller@sothebys.com)