Saturday, October 22, 2011

Auction Report: Recent Sales

- At Swann's 17 October Early Printed, Medical and Scientific Books sale, the top seller was a copy of Cristobal de Morales' Missarum Liber Primus (1546), which fetched $33,600.

- Full results for the sale of The Robert H. and Donna L. Jackson Collection Part I: 19th Century Literature on 18 October are here. All told, 142 of the 251 lots sold, and a world record was set for Trollope when the rare complete copy of Trollope's Ralph the Heir in parts sold for $88,900. The first edition Middlemarch in parts made $56,250, while the complete set of Pickwick Papers in parts was bid up to $31,250.

The autograph manuscript leaf of The Pickwick Papers and first edition David Copperfield in parts didn't sell, nor did Audubon's Quadrupeds in the original parts or George Eliot's brother's copy of her Scenes of Clerical Life.

- At Sotheby's The Library of an English Bibliophile, Part II sale on 18 October, 104 of the 155 lots sold, for a total of $2,607,976. Reserves seemed quite high; of the eight lots estimated at more than $100,000 just three sold: the Third Folio made $542,500; the first printing of Poe's Tales (1845) sold for $314,500, and the first issue Leaves of Grass fetched $230,500. A first edition in English of Newton's Principia (1729) sold for $110,500.

Bidding on some of the unsold lots got quite high: the First Folio reached $550,000, the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses was bid up to $420,000, and the first printing of The Great Gatsby was also up in the six-figures but passed.

- Results for the 18 October Bloomsbury sale of Books from the Library of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors are here; 164 of 171 lots sold. As expected, the top seller was Johannes Kip's Nouveau Theatre de Grand Bretagne (1713-1728), in three volumes, which sold for £42,000.

- PBA Galleries sold Nevada, California & Americana: The Library of Clint Maish, with additions, on 20 October. Full results are here. The top seller was a copy of JFK's Profiles in Courage, inscribed to Pamela Harriman, which fetched $6,000.

November preview coming soon.