Sotheby’s Posts Ambitious and Diverse December Sale Schedule

Sotheby’s global Books and Manuscripts Department has posted a diverse and ambitious sales schedule for the final month of 2024, with material ranging from the fourth through the twenty-first centuries and spanning collecting categories from travel and exploration to Americana to literature, Judaica, natural history, fine bindings and beyond.

New York kicks the month off with an online auction of The Ted Benttinen Library of Exploration and Adventure closing on December 9. Ted Benttinen was well known and well-liked by the trade, which recognized and rewarded his penchant for fine condition and special copies. The Benttinen auction will mark Sotheby’s most significant foray into travel and exploration books since their auction of the celebrated collection of Franklin Brooke-Hitching a decade ago.

Benttinen’s interest in adventure was honestly earned. Before a successful career in finance at UBS, Ted worked as an oceanographer at the Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, serving as a marine technician on more than 50 voyages aboard the research vessels Trident and Endeavor.

Although often regarded as a “Polar Collection,” the Benttinen Library is much actually much broader in scope. Its holdings range from early navigation and Pacific voyages—including an impressive selection of Cook—to works on South America, Patagonia, pirates, Charles Darwin, Hudson’s Bay, Lapland (Sápmi), and the Northwest Passage, with a standout array of materials related to Sir John Franklin. Anchoring the library are treasures on Antarctic exploration, featuring the likes of Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Nansen, all in uniformly enviable fine condition.

The indisputable highlight of the library is a collection of 69 silver gelatin photographs taken by Frank Hurley during Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Transantarctic Endurance Expedition of 1914–1916 ($80,000–120,000). The Benttinen photos include some of Hurley's most striking images from the expedition, including the Endurance stuck in the ice at night and brightly illuminated by Hurley's magnesium flash, an array of desolate snowscapes, penguins and seals, domestic views of the crew playing chess and warming themselves in front of the fire, and more. The window mounts on grey paper seem to match select presentation albums commissioned by Hurley shortly following his return. These photographs were at one time owned by a Mr. Henriksen, an employee at Cr. Salvesen & Co., Ltd., who was purportedly based in South Georgia in 1916 at the time of the rescue.

The following day, December 10, the New York department hosts the closing of an online sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts. Particularly strong in Americana, cartography, and literature. Appropriate to the month, Charles Dickens and his Christmas Carol are well represented, as is his greatest illustrator, “Phiz” (Hablot K. Browne).

But contemporary countrywomen of Dickens carry the palm in this auction: Jane Austen is represented by Lady Guilford’s copy in boards of Emma ($30,000–40,000), while Emily Brontë and Ann Brontë — writing, respectively, as Ellis Bell and Acton Bell—are represented by the first, joint publications of their novels Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey ($90,000–130,000). The sale also includes one of the great prizes of African Americana: a Banneker Almanack. Bannaker's [sic] Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky, and North-Carolina Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord 1796 by the self-taught free African-American man assisted with the preliminary survey of Washington, D.C., notes in its preface “ that the Maker of the Universe is no respecter of colours; that the colour of the skin is no ways connected with strength of mind or intellectual powers” ($7,000–10,000).

But it is Sotheby’s London department that begins things on December 10, with a live sale that morning of Bibliotheca Brookeriana: A Renaissance Library Part V. The fifth installment of the magnificent Bibliotheca Brookeriana showcases readers and their books: bindings, inscriptions, manuscript shelfmarks and annotations are all indicators of notable ownership. Significant binders include Niccolò Franzese, the Fugger Binder, the Vatican Bindery, including one volume bound for Pope Pius V, Wotton Binders B and C, and the Mahieu Aesop Binder for Claude de Laubespine. Beautifully decorated fore-edges indicate that numerous volumes belonged to significant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century libraries, including the Pillone library at Belluno. Further noteworthy owners, leaving their marks in various forms, include Marcus Fugger, Thomas Mahieu, Gian Federico Madruzzo, a series of eminent cardinals, Perrenot de Granvelle, Guglielmo Sirleto, Lorenzo Campeggio and Jean du Bellay, and three early female owners, including Marguerite de France.

The highest price in October’s Part IV Brooker auction, The Aldine Collection D-M, was the Pillone copy of Lucianus Samosatensis, Opera, 1503 ($469,900; estimate $60,000–90,000). The auction of Part V in London offers five (!) more opportunities to acquire a Pillone fore-edge painting: Augustinus, Opus absolutissimum, Basel, 1522 (£26,000–32,000); Castro, Adversus omnes hareses, Cologne, 1543 (£40,000–60,000); Gregorius Nazianzenus, Orationes XXX, Basel, 1531 (£30,000–40,000); Landulfus Sagax, Romana historia, Basel, 1532 (£50,000–70,000); and Origenes, Opera, Basel, 1545, 2 volumes (£80,000–100,000).

The London department also has a general online auction, Books, Manuscripts and Music from Medieval to Modern, closing on December 12. First among the many highlights has to be a first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince bound with a second edition of his Florentine Histories in a seventeenth-century Italian binding (£200,000–300,000). Il principe, it must be noted, lacks the title-page—which seems not to have ever been part of this volume—but it nonetheless represents a previously unknown copy of one of the most influential books of all time, only twelve copies of which are recorded, all in institutional libraries. The auction also includes Richard Strauss’s autograph full score of the orchestral tone poem "Macbeth", op.23, 8 February 1888 (£180,000–220,000) and an exceptionally early land grant by the Council of New England from 1624 (£80,000–120,000).

Sotheby’s Paris, too, has a general online sale, Livres et Manuscrits, de Galilée à Warhol, which closes on December 6. As the title implies, offerings span from Dialogo di Galileo Galilei, Florence, 1632, in contemporary vellum (€60,000–80,000) to a first edition of the Pop Art icon 1 Cent Life, one of twenty copies reserved for Paris and bound in Pop style by Leroux (€120,000–150,000).

Sotheby’s closes its busy bibliophilic month on December 18 with two live auctions. First up is the earliest surviving inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments, incised in Paleo-Hebrew during the late Roman-Byzantine era, The Holy Land, ca. 300–800 CE. ($1,000,000–2,000,000). This remarkable artifact is approximately 1,500 years old and is the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments still extant from this early era. Weighing 115 pounds and measuring approximately two feet in height, it is now called the Yavne Tablet after the city on the coastal plain of the Land of Israel near where it was rediscovered more than a century ago. This monumental, incised marble slab was serendipitously uncovered during excavations for a railroad track running through the Land of Israel to Egypt. The significance of the discovery went unrecognized for many decades, and for thirty years it served as a paving stone in a local home.

The single-lot auction of the Ten Commandments tablet is followed by a live sale of Important Judaica, which features nearly thirty manuscripts from the esteemed collection of David Solomon Sassoon and almost 100 manuscripts from the celebrated collection of Moses Montefiore. Click here.

For more images from this sale, click here.

Full information about all of these sales, as well as other Sotheby’s auctions that include books and manuscripts, can be found at this link: click here.