Charlie Chaplin in Pencil, French Inventions, and Early Judaica: Auction Preview

A couple quiet weeks coming up in the sale rooms but here are the sales I'll be watching:

On Monday, December 19 at Dorotheum, 441 lots of Autographs, Manuscripts, Documents. A collection of letters and ephemera from the geographer Eugen Oberhummer (1859–1944) has the top starting bid at €5,000. A small collection of Venetian parchment documents with attached lead seals and five broadsheets starts at €4,000. Two small pencil drawings of scenes from Charlie Chaplin's film "The Kid" (1921) showing Chaplin and Jackie Coogan also starts at €4,000.

ALDE sells 191 lots of Livres Anciens et du XIXe Siècle – Architecture on Tuesday, December 20. A 72-volume set of Voltaire's Oeuvres Complètes is expected to sell for €15,000–20,000. A 254-volume set of the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1782–1832) rates an estimate of €10,000–12,000, as does the elaborate Thesaurus Anatomicus by Frederik Ruysch (1701–1716). Jean-Gaffin's Machines et Inventions Approuvées par l'Académie Royale des Sciences (1776–1778) could fetch €4,000–5,000, and a set of Brisson's Ornithologie (1760) is estimated at €3,000–4,000.

Also on Tuesday, 206 lots of Fine Books & Ephemera at New England Book Auctions.

The sale of the second part of The Halpern Judaica Collection: Tradition and Treasure at Sotheby's New York ends on Tuesday. The 142 lots include a copy of the 1522 Bomberg edition of the Tractate Temurah, estimated at $7,000–10,000. A haftarah scroll commissioned by Baruch and Sarah Mayer of Wolfisheim and written by Joseph Bloch at Strasbourg in 1873 is estimated at $5,000–7,000. The Tractate Bava Batra from an early octavo edition of the Talmud printed at Krakow (about 1620) rates the same estimate.