BOSTON, MASS.- From a handwritten account composed aboard the Enola Gay during the Hiroshima atomic bombing mission to Pierre de Coubertin’s working plan for reviving the Olympic Games, RR Auction’s September 2026 Remarkable Rarities sale brings together manuscripts and artifacts tied to consequential moments across modern history.
At the center of the sale is Capt. Robert A. Lewis’s mission-used flight logbook from the Enola Gay, containing 25 handwritten pages, including an eight-page account written aboard the aircraft as the Hiroshima mission unfolded on Aug. 6, 1945.
Lewis, the Enola Gay’s co-pilot, began his diary with the preflight briefing and takeoff from Tinian and continued recording events as the aircraft approached its target. He ran out of ink during the flight and continued in pencil. After the bomb was released, Lewis described the flash, the impact felt aboard the aircraft and the cloud rising over Hiroshima.
A later inserted page records his reaction after news of the destruction began to emerge: “I honestly have the feeling of groping for words to explain this or I might say My God what have we done.” Lewis added, “If I live a hundred years I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.”
The notebook continues with Lewis’s 14-page history of the 509th Composite Group, begun Aug. 10, 1945, as well as three additional manuscript pages of later notes and verse.
Another manuscript reaches back to the formative months of the modern Olympic movement. Pierre de Coubertin’s four-page handwritten “Proposal of an Athletic Exhibition in 1900,” dated Jan. 30, 1894, predates the formal creation of the modern Olympics and the International Olympic Committee in June 1894.
Coubertin proposed recreating Olympia’s sacred Altis as part of the 1900 Paris Exposition, with displays tracing athletics from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval and modern sporting traditions. His purpose was explicit: “The goal is indeed to educate rather than to entertain the public.”
The manuscript lays out ideas for races, games and wrestling, along with classifications for fencing, hunting, ice sports and cycling. It also sets out Coubertin’s views on amateur athletics and what he described as the “moral direction” of the project. Signed by Coubertin, the document dates from nearly five months before the establishment of the International Olympic Committee.
The sale moves from the origins of the modern Olympics to the creative process behind Blood on the Tracks, widely regarded as Bob Dylan’s masterpiece. A two-part archive features a single double-sided manuscript in Dylan’s hand with working lyrics for “Idiot Wind” on one side and “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” on the other.
The “Idiot Wind” manuscript combines lines closely related to the released recording with material that was later changed or abandoned. On the reverse, Dylan’s nearly complete working draft of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” retains the earlier title, “You’re Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go,” and includes an additional verse omitted from the released recording.
Accompanying the manuscript is a handwritten transcription by Ellen Bernstein, now Ellen Ziffren, who was director of West Coast A&R for Columbia Records in San Francisco in 1974. Ziffren consigned the archive directly. Her transcription was written on a leaf she tore from one of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks notebooks after Dylan first played the song for her.
Wartime planning is represented by Winston Churchill’s April 1944 letter to Gen. Bernard Montgomery, written on 10 Downing Street letterhead and marked “Most Secret.”
“Thank you so much for your letter of March 30, with which you sent me a copy of your note on Air Requirements for OVERLORD as viewed by the army,” Churchill wrote.
The letter dates from the final planning stages for Operation Overlord, weeks before the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy, and concerns Montgomery’s memorandum on the air requirements for the coming Allied invasion.
The sale also includes an early German military Enigma I cipher machine, serial number A1317. Ordered circa 1931-1932 and likely delivered to the German military in 1933, the three-rotor machine represents an early production example of the electromechanical cipher system adopted by the German armed forces.
Housed in an early stained oak transport case, the Enigma retains rotors II, IV and V and is partially operational, with an encoded bulb illuminating on approximately 75% of keystrokes. The machine was acquired in 1995 from the family of a German collector and was later exhibited in a French museum for more than two decades.
The sale also includes a factory-sealed 4GB first-generation Apple iPhone, Model A1203. The unopened phone is from the original 2007 release and retains the early box design showing 12 icons on the screen.
Apple discontinued the $499 4GB model on Sept. 5, 2007, just over two months after the iPhone’s debut, after most buyers opted to pay $100 more for the 8GB version. The example in the sale remains factory sealed, with a short split to the shrinkwrap at the upper rear corner.
Taken together, the material crosses disciplines and centuries but repeatedly returns to moments of creation, decision and change: Lewis writing aboard the Enola Gay, Coubertin putting an Olympic revival into concrete form, Dylan revising lyrics, Churchill reviewing preparations for Overlord, Enigma machines securing military communications and Apple introducing the first generation of the iPhone. The manuscripts and artifacts preserve the working documents and objects associated with those moments.
Remarkable Rarities by RR Auction opened on Aug. 24 and will conclude on Sept. 24, 2026.
