And the 212-lot New England Book Auctions sale of Fine Books & Ephemera ends on Tuesday; the usual wide range of material here.
At Dominic Winter on Wednesday, October 11, 459 lots of Books, Prints & Playing Cards, Natural History, Maps & Atlases, including Winston Churchill's Marlborough (1933–1938), signed by Churchill in the first volume (£5,000–8,000); the first and second series of the Transactions of the Geological Society (1811–1856), expected to sell for £3,000–4,000; and Harris' Portraits of the Game and Wild Animals of Southern Africa (1840), estimated at £3,000–5,000. At the same range is a copy of the 1613 folio edition of the King James Bible.
Sotheby's New York sells the Bibliotheca Brookeriana: A Renaissance Library, Magnificent Books and Bindings on Wednesday. The evening sale on Wednesday includes 90 lots, among them blue-paper copies of Sebastiano Serlio's Terzo libro and Regole generali di architecttura (1540–1541), in a binding by the Cupid's Bow Binder ($400,000–500,000); a copy of the 1546 Paris edition of the Hypnerotomachie in a binding by Wotton Binder C for Marcus Fugger ($300,000–400,000); and a sixteenth-century manuscript of alchemical recipes bound for Anne de Montmorency ($300,000–350,000).
More from the Bibliotheca Brookeriana on Thursday, October 12, as Sotheby's sells the Aldine Collection A–C, in 327 lots. Expected to lead the way is Jean Grolier's copy of the 1499 Hypnerotomachia, in a Gomar Estienne binding ($400,000–600,000). Multiple other Grolier bindings and other pretty spectacular works feature here; I'll have more on these sales in the next print issue of FB&C.
At Swann Galleries on Thursday, 277 lots of Early Printed Books. Rating the top estimate at $50,000–70,000 are the plays Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus extracted from the First Folio (1623).
There is some interesting material related to the Fortsas bibliohoax and its perpetrator, Chalon, in the October 13–14 sale at Arenberg Auctions.
