The selection is highlighted by 10 Aldines from the libraries of bibliophile Jean Grolier. As Brooker explains: “Grolier greatly appreciated Aldine editions, for their typography, their layout, and the quality of their material aspects. Grolier was not a collector of rare books, he was a collector of modern fine printing, and the Aldine press specialized in that… it was the typographical beauty and the elegance of these books that he found special.” Each of the books are bound with ‘Grolier bindings’, his style of bookbinding which he had commissioned, featuring elegantly, gilt-tooled goatskin bindings, often including his name and motto.
The inaugural auction will also feature around 90 works of representative highlights across the collection, led by copies of Sebastiano Serlio’s Terzo libro and Regole generali di architecttura (estimate $300,000/400,000). Terzo libro was dedicated to François I, King of France in the 16th century who contributed funds towards the cost of publishing. Printed on large, blue paper, highlighting their special and rare quality, these copies are suspected to have been carried from Venice to France, bound there to be presented to potential French patrons. Printed by the Italian printer and type founder Francesco Marcolini, both texts are bound in green goatskin and share nearly identical endleaves.
Other highlights include:
- a first edition copy of the French translation of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Paris, 1546), bound in 1545 for Marx Fugger (estimate $120,000/180,000)
- an early manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting containing 375 chapters, and illustrated with 56 drawings in ink (estimate $120,000/180,000)
- a wax-relief portrait by artist Giovanni Battista Capocaccia depicting Pope Pius V with his secretary (estimate $200,000/300,000). Nestled within a red leather box and with a gilded cover to complete the book form, this work was kept by the Pope in his library, and was likely bound by the Vatican Bindery. It is an exceptionally rare work, and the only signed relief by Capocaccia
Also on offer is a volume from the library of Paolo Giordano Orsini (1541-1585), the duca di Bracciano suspected of murdering both his first wife, Isabella de’ Medici (daughter of Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo), and the husband of his mistress, Vittoria Accoramboni. This book belongs to a group of some 26 volumes bound for the 15-year-old Paolo Giordano during his only visit to Paris in May-September 1556, when he accompanied the apostolic legate Cardinal Carafa to secure an alliance with Henri II against the Spanish (Bible, in Italian, Venice, 1547; estimate $30,000/40,000). His taste for brilliant colors extended into his library where he shelved books bound in red, yellow, and green velvet, in red, green, blue, and white leather, some bichrome, many with red or blue silk ties.
The range of French bindings includes the first printing of Étienne Charpin’s edition of Ausonius, a text based on the ninth century manuscript that Charpin discovered in a Benedictine monastery. Bound for a German baron, the book wears a white vellum binding, decorated with a gold-tooled lozenge centerpiece.
Featuring among the Italian provenances are nine bindings from the library formed by Bonaccorso Grino and members of the Pillone family, given fore-edge decoration painted by Cesare Vecellio, a relative of Italian painter Titian. The grouping is highlighted by Jean de Jandun’s volume of three medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s metaphysics and cosmology, formerly in the collection of Odorico Pillone (estimate $150,000/200,000). The contemporary binding is a magnificent medallion-stamped binding featuring Alexander the Great.
Several of the German bindings were previously owned by members of the Fugger family of Augsburg, a mercantile and banking dynasty of the 15th and 16th centuries, who had many of their books finely bound in Venice by the so-called 'Fugger Binder'. Many of the bindings featured in this auction were bound by the prodigious book maker.
T. Kimball Brooker was former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and is currently President of the Barbara Oil Company. He graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in French literature, and in 1962 was awarded Senior Prize of the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes at Yale. 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 achieve a terminal degree in Art History, titling his doctoral dissertation “Upright Works: The Emergence of the Vertical Library in the Sixteenth Century.” Brooker established the T. Kimball Brooker Prize sponsored by the University of Chicago, to foster a love of the book and to encourage book collecting among undergraduate students.
The series begins with a live evening sale on October 11, with the first sale dedicated to the Aldine editions on October 12. A public pre-sale exhibition will be on view at Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries October 5 – 11 . Additional sales will take place in New York and London through 2025.
