Darwin Corrected Proofs and Karl Marx Letter to Publisher at Christie's
Christie's
Darwin's revised proof sheets for Insectivorous Plants
Christie’s London sale Valuable Books and Manuscripts on July 12 features a wide range of lots described as "visual delights and documents of turning points in human history".
Leading the sale are corrected proofs by Charles Darwin for a work on insectivorous plants. Showing substantial revisions in his own hand and one of Darwin’s final published works, Insectivorous Plants was a study of the adaptations of such organisms and represented a continuation of his enquiries into the process of evolution. Unpublished and hitherto unrecorded by Darwin Online, the appearance of these annotated proofs at public auction allows for the first time a reconstruction of Darwin’s revision of the text in preparation for publication (estimate: £150,000-200,000).
What promised to be another very popular lot is a long autograph letter by Karl Marx to his French publisher Maurice Lachâtre on the 'revolutionary spirit' of Das Kapital. It emphasises the original approach underpinning his seminal work, expressing his fears that the book will be poorly received in France and mentioning the 'overworked' Engels. The estimate range is £150,000-200,000.
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Christie's
Einstein letter
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Marx letter
Also going under the hammer is an autograph letter from Albert Einstein to Rudi Mandl, a Czech refugee who was a restaurant dishwasher when they met. Mandl badgered Einstein into publishing his only known article about gravitational lensing, a consequence of Einstein’s general relativity. Einstein’s only article about it starts by saying how Rudi Mandl persuaded him to write about it (estimate: £50,000-80,000).
Other highlights include:
a 13th-century manuscript of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica
a series of lavishly-illustrated Books of Hours and decorated codices from Ethiopia, Armenia and Siam
illustrated printed books including Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s depictions of Empress Josephine’s gardens at Malmaison, published by Étienne-Pierre Ventenat in 1803, and Marc Chagall’s illustrations for Homer’s Odyssey, printed in 1975
atlases by Ortelius, Mercator, Janssonius and Braun and Hogenberg, plus an extremely rare Chinese wall-map of the world, Complete Map of the Everlasting Great Qing with All under Heaven Unified, published in Beijing in 1814
