Boxing Books, Brahms Letter, Fine Press: Auction Preview

Here are the auctions I'll be watching this week:

The Bonhams online sale of Books and Manuscripts, featuring the collection of Delmer and Mary Lou Daves, ends on Tuesday, August 22. The 214 lots include a rare broadside prospectus for Scientific American from 1846, along with some associated material (estimated at $2,000–3,000); an 1880 Johannes Brahms autograph letter rates the same estimate. A group of early issues of Verve are expected to sell for $1,500–2,500, and the same range has been assigned to 61 eighteenth-century "warning out" documents from various New England towns. Quite a few lots in this sale are being offered without reserve.

At Chiswick Auctions on Thursday, August 24, 347 lots of Books & Works on Paper, to include the Boxing Collection of Brian and Debbie Watkins. A second printing copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone shares the top estimate of £4,000–6,000 with an 1808 edition of the Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza. A copy of the 1678 first edition in English of Francis Willughby's Ornithology is estimated at £1,600–1,800.

Forum Auctions sells 400 lots of Modern Literature in an online sale on Thursday. Among the notable lots is a copy of William Stephens Hayward's Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864), estimated at £600–800. A number of author group lots in this sale.

At PBA Galleries on Thursday, Rare & Antiquarian: Fine Press, Fine Bindings, Illustrated, Miniature, and Golf Books, in 503 lots. Expected to lead the way is a deluxe copy of the 2003 Editions Koch Fragments of Parmenides, estimated at $6,000–9,000. The 1973 Officina Bodoni edition of The Fables of Aesop is expected to fetch $3,000–5,000, as are Robert Hoe's copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) and a 1743 French pocket almanac in an embroidered binding from the Estelle Doheny collection.