DALLAS, TX.- In the two years since Heritage debuted its Historical Platinum Signature® Auction, the semiannual event has become among the most anticipated on its auction calendar — for its breadth and depth and contents that span centuries and continents. It is also the rare Heritage event that traverses numerous categories, including Rare Books, Historical Manuscripts, Americana, Space Exploration and Arms & Armor.

Here, bound in a single 97-lot event that takes place July 25, are letters and manuscripts handwritten by those who need no introduction, titans of history who shaped yesterdays and tomorrows in their respective images: Ludwig van Beethoven, George Washington, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Abraham Lincoln, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marie Antoinette. Also featured are the first editions spanning the exploration of North America to the introduction of a boy wizard named Harry. Here, too, are items made by, signed by and touched by those who created, charted and steered the human experience on earth and beyond its confines.

It’s the oldest rejoinder in the auction world: This belongs in a museum. Only because it’s true.

“Our collectors always look forward to this highly curated auction filled with special material, the best of the best in their respective categories,” says Executive Vice President Joe Maddalena. “The interest in these auctions is never less than extraordinary: The opportunity to own this material appeals both to collectors and consignors because these Historical Platinum events showcase this material in their proper cultural contexts. The significance of this material is extraordinary across the board.”

Look no further than an extraordinary three-page letter written in German and signed by Beethoven to an unidentified recipient. It’s brief and asks only that its recipient carve out time for an afternoon visit with the composer — something that would have been handled in a dashed-off text message today. But it contains a few words and a name that elevates its status, as Beethoven writes: “[I] petition you to bring along the letter from Ries.”

The Beethoven scholar will undoubtedly thrill at the mention of Ferdinand Ries, scion of a musical family — and son of Franz Anton Ries, an acclaimed violinist under whom Beethoven studied. Ferdinand owed much of his musical education to Beethoven — and his career, too, as the composer’s letters of recommendation paved Ferdinand’s path to positions in Baden and Silesia.

Artaria, the modern-day iteration of the 18th-century music publishing company, notes that “in return for Beethoven’s assistance, Ries often acted as his secretary and copyist, quickly becoming one of the elder composer’s closest friends and advisers.” Indeed, even as Ries became an acclaimed pianist and composer himself, he continued to negotiate with those seeking to publish Beethoven’s works and commission the composer, and shortly before he died in 1838, he collaborated on a biography of Beethoven with Franz Gerhard Wegeler.

There are numerous significant presidential manuscripts to be found in this event, among them a page entirely in Thomas Jefferson’s hand consisting of notes on his private papers collected on a bookshelf. Among their inventories lot: “Rough draughts, notes &c. while Member of Congress & Minister Plenipo. at Paris. 1775 — 1789.” This reference nods at Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, preserved at the Library of Congress.

Here, as well, is an 1860 letter from Abraham Lincoln to the Secretary of the Republican National Executive Committee regarding campaign efforts; a presidential pardon signed by George Washington; and an 1812 handwritten, signed letter from his successor, John Adams, in which he begins a history lesson to his son-in-law by noting that “it is of no other use to ruminate upon the faults, Errors & blunders of Washington in the revolutionary War; or upon those of Congress and Jefferson, or Congress and Madison, during the last twelve years.”

Tesla, the engineer and futurist, took time out of a summer’s day in 1937 to write Universal Pictures’ co-founder Carl Laemmle about his prediction that we’d soon be able to speak to Mars. Tesla’s impact on at least one Universal film is evident: For Frankenstein, special effects pioneer Kenneth Strickfaden created a colossal Tesla coil he called the Megavolt Senior — “his pride and joy,” wrote The Museum of Modern Art in 2019. Tesla thought Laemmle — a man of “genius and ideals” — would enjoy reading about how “by my inventions it has become possible to transmit considerable amounts of energy at distances of thousands of light years.”

Decades later, Universal became linked to another highlight in this auction: Harry Potter, whose Wizarding World has cast its spell over the hamlet of Orlando.

This event features the two earliest issues of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, including the first time The Boy Who Lived’s name appeared in print — and the last time anyone misspelled author J.K. Rowling’s name. Here is one of the 200 uncorrected Philosopher’s Stone proofs with the title page that credits the book to “J.A. Rowling” and a copyright page that reads “Joanne Rowling.”

Even more coveted among Potter collectors is the novel’s first appearance in hardback. After a dozen publishers rejected Rowling’s debut, Bloomsbury printed just 500 hardback copies of Philosopher’s Stone, with most bound for public libraries. The few copies that have surfaced at auction, including the copy in this event, have become among the most coveted titles in modern literature: At the end of 2021, Heritage sold a copy for $471,000, at the time the highest price ever paid for the boy wizard’s debut in any form — and the most expensive commercially published 20th-century work of fiction ever sold at auction.

This event’s Rare Books and Literature section also features remarkable copies of books held by and written by a Founding Father, the leader of the People’s Republic of China and a French emperor: George Washington, Deng Xiaoping and Napoleon Bonaparte, respectively.

Printed by fellow Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, Washington’s first-edition copy of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Cato Major, or his Discourse of Old Age: With Explanatory Notesbears his ownership signature on the page “The Printer to the Reader,” linking two key figures in American Independence.

Richard D. Smyser, the editor of the Tennessee daily paper the Oak Ridger, visited the People’s Republic of China under the auspices of the American Society of News Editors in June 1975, four years before Deng visited the United States. At the time, Deng, then in his early 70s, was the Republic’s deputy premier of the State Council under Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

Smyser brought the second English edition of Mao’s Little Red Book, printed long before it became one of the most widely reproduced books of all time (there are said to be more than a billion copies in existence). The editor asked Deng to sign his copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao, famously filled with some 267 aphorisms (among them, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”) that outlined the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and became mandatory reading — and an inspirational text for the Black Panthers, among others.

Ironically, the man who signed Smyser’s copy grew to dislike the book “and tried to suppress it” altogether, the BBC once noted, favoring economic development over cultural revolution. Says Maddalena, “This is one of the most significant pieces in this auction — and one of my favorites.”

From Napoleon’s library in exile at St. Helena comes Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney’s two-volume Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, first published in 1787 — and still in print today. This travelogue, religious history and philosophical text features Napoleon’s handwritten annotations throughout the text.

Here, too, are the photos signed by Tsar Nicholas II and heir apparent Alexei in 1913, the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty; Albert Einstein, who in 1948 inscribed his iconic photograph to Mr. and Mrs. Eric Marmorek, the former a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps; and J. Robert Oppenheimer, accompanied in this Alfred Eisenstaedt photo for LIFE magazine by Einstein. These aren’t merely valuable keepsakes that prove someone famous once put pen to photo; they’re works of art that serve today as tangible links to far-off yesterdays.

One of the auction’s numerous centerpiece offerings is a work of art that adorned a work of art: David Kyle’s original dust jacket illustration for the first edition of Isaac Asimov’s 1951 novel Foundation, a collection of connected short stories that served as the foundation for the visionary’s heralded, impactful trilogy. These are the tales about the imminent, inevitable collapse of a 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire that inspired New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to become an economist.

“I didn’t grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest,” Krugman once wrote. “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.” In time, the books led to the ongoing Apple TV+ series starring Jared Harris as Seldon, the mathematician who develops algorithms that allow him to predict the future. But its roots are in our not-so-distant past, in a book bound by this artwork by David Kyle, who also served as co-founder of Foundation’s initial (and prophetic) sci-fi publisher Gnome Press, responsible for numerous classics during its 14-year run.

There is much space for outer space in this event, led by two extraordinary lots consisting of sign-in sheets for classes NASA astronauts were required to take: “Principles of Terrestrial and Lunar Geology” and “Mineralogy,” each from 1964 and signed by men who would become heroes and legends in their lifetimes — among them Scott Carpenter, Alan Shepard, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Neil Armstrong. More than 20 lots in this event come from The Armstrong Family Collection™, which spans from 1962, when he joined NASA’s astronaut class, to his death in 2012. Heritage has been honored to offer this extraordinary collection for the last six years, from which this signed photo, the Apollo 11 crew-signed insurance cover and a few of the astronaut’s rifles and shotguns hail.

Armstrong said in 1971 that “knowledge is fundamental to all human achievements and progress. It is both the key and the quest that advances mankind.” That might as well serve as the motto for Heritage’s July 25 Historical Platinum Signature® Auction.