Louisa May Alcott Letters and Early Hemingway Photo Album to Auction
Louisa May Alcott, one of three autograph letters signed to Ellen Humphreys
Swann Galleries' Fine Books sale on October 24 includes three original letters written by Louisa May Alcott to a friend of her deceased youngest sister May, as well as the final tranche of material from the collection of bibliophile and collector Ken Rapoport.
The three autograph signed letters (estimate: $3,000 - $4,000) by Alcott to Ellen Humphreys in 1880, 1881, and 1885 from Concord and Boston are each written over four pages, two with envelopes. She writes to a British friend of her deceased sister Abigail May Alcott Nieriker (1840-1879) who died shortly after giving birth to her first child, Louisa May 'Lulu' Nieriker.
Humphreys appears to have asked for news about May's daughter and Alcott describes her: "She is very like her mother, slender, fair, blue-eyed & golden haired." By the third letter Lulu is nearly six years old. "She runs wild from June to Sept at the seaside & is the prize child among the fifty who go to Nonquitt where our cottage is. I am very proud when strangers say, 'That's a magnificent child, whose is it?' & the answer, 'Miss Alcott's baby,' makes me laugh."
The auction will also feature the final section of material from Ken Rapoport’s collection, featuring in particular early printed Spanish literature and the chivalric tales and picaresque roots that inspired Cervantes, a 1632 second folio of Shakespeare 1632 (estimate: $120,000 - $180,000) and early works of Milton, Chaucer, Drayton and Donne.
As well as a limited first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, one of 170 copies printed (Paris, Three Mountains Press, 1924, estimate $20,000 - $30,000), also going under the hammer is a photo album compiled by a Red Cross volunteer who served in the Ambulance Service with Hemingway during the First World War. It contains unpublished images of Hemingway and his fellow volunteers from the time they shipped overseas, through their service in Italy, and includes an image of the injured writer in his Milan hospital bed (estimate: $20,000 - $30,000).
