Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Auction Report: PBA, Bloomsbury, Bonhams

- Results of the 6 October Fine Literature & Books in All Fields sale PBA Galleries are here.
The first edition Leaves of Grass failed to sell; the top lot ended up being the first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which sold for $22,800. That Jessie Bayes illuminated manuscript of two Shelley poems fetched $18,000.

- Bloomsbury's 6 October Bibliophile Sale results are here.

- The results of Bonhams Fine Books and Manuscripts sale, held on 10 October, are here; some big(gish) prices in this one! The top seller proved to be a special, hand-colored copy of la Fontaine's Fables (1755-1759) produced for Louis XV; it sold for $122,500. The first edition of McKenney and Hall made $92,500, while the copy of A Noble Fragment with the original Gutenberg Bible leaf fetched $56,250 (as did the Nuremberg Chronicle). The second edition of William Wood's New Englands Prospect (1635) sold for $31,250.

The 1776 John Adams letter to William Cooper about the construction of Navy vessels and the suite of Robert Furber's 1730 Twelve Months of Flowers failed to sell.