Yosemite Photographs, Fly Fishing, Jefferson Letter: Auction Preview

Here are the auctions coming up this week:

On Tuesday, April 30, 205 lots of Angling, Big Game Hunting, Firearms at New England Book Auctions. Lots include the 1899 publication Great and Small Game of Africa (1899), edited by H.A. Bryden and estimated at $600–900; L.L. Fenton's The Rifle in India (1923), expected to sell for $500–700; and Frederic M. Halford's The Dry-Fly Man's Handbook (1913), estimated at $300–500. At the same estimate range are a deluxe copy of Garrison & Carmichael's Master's Guide to Building a Bamboo Fly Rod (1999) and a deluxe copy of John Swarbrick's List of Wharfedale Flies, with specimens of flies tied by Stuart Bowdin. The second part of this sale will be held on Thursday, May 2 (237 lots).

At Doyle on Wednesday, May 1, 358 lots of Rare Books, Autographs & Maps, including an 1802 Thomas Jefferson letter to John Francis Mercer which mentions the arrest of Toussaint L'Ouverture in Haiti ($40,000–60,000); a first octavo edition of Audubon's Birds of America ($25,000–35,000); and a presentation copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night ($25,000–35,000). A 13th-century manuscript Old Testament in a (later) English "somber binding" is expected to sell for $20,000–30,000.

PBA Galleries sells Americana – Travel & Exploration – World History – Maps, Prints & Views on Thursday, in 391 lots. A complete mixed-edition set of Cook's Voyages rates the top estimate at $15,000–25,000; a third edition variant issue of Samuel Kneeland's Wonders of the Yosemite Valley (1872) with twenty mounted photographs could sell for $12,000–18,000. Edgar Cherry & Co.'s Redwood and Lumbering in California Forests (1884) with twenty-four photographs, is estimated at $6,000–9,000.