NEW YORK, NY.- Swann's fall Fine Books auction on Thursday, October 22, features special copies of important books in a spectrum of collecting categories. Collectors of early printed books will find incunabula and post-incunabula, including examples in period bindings, along with sixteenth-century English imprints.
Special first edition works of nineteenth- and twentieth- century literature are well represented, with first editions by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Emily Bront, Bram Stoker, John Steinbeck, David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. Top highlights include Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, first edition, first printing in dust jacket, 1925 ($15,000-20,000); Stoker’s Dracula, 1897 ($7,000-9,000); Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, inscribed first edition in dust jacket, 1940 ($6,000-8,000); and Bront’s Wuthering Heights, first American edition, 1848 ($4,000-6,000). A run of Stephen King works is led by a signed stated first edition of Firestarter, 1980 ($2,000-3,000); also of note is the deluxe 25th-anniversary special edition of It, 2011 ($1,000-2,000).
Standout children’s literature includes E.B. White’s Stuart Little, stated first edition, inscribed, 1945 ($4,000-6,000), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, rare first American edition, second issue, 1866 ($3,000-5,000). Works by L. Frank Baum, Roald Dahl, A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, and more are also present.
Science is well represented with a first edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s A Collection of Papers on the Theory of Light as published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, 1771 ($10,000-15,000); a first American edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, 1860 ($2,200-3,200); and a first printed edition of Galileo Galilei’s letter to Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 1636 ($3,000-5,000). Medical works include Andreas Vesalius’s Tabulae Anatomicae Facsimile, a large format facsimile of a portrait and six anatomical tables on parchment, circa 1983 ($4,000-6,000); his Opera Omnia Anatomica & Chirurgica, first and only collected edition, 1725 ($3,000-5,000); William Harvey’s Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis Sanguinis, 1648 ($1,000-1,500); and an eighteenth-century Greek manuscript of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates ($5,000-7,000).
The European travel and exploration offering features printed and illustrated accounts of early visitors to parts of the globe novel to dwellers of the western hemisphere, including Africa, Lapland, India, Asia, Persia, and the Americas. Maritime works on British naval adventures form an important part of the travel titles in this sale. Notable lots include Filippo Pigafetta’s Relatione del Reame di Congo et delle Circonvicine Contrade, first edition, circa 1591 ($7,000-9,000), that details travels in Africa, and James Ralfe’s The Naval Chronology of Great Britain, first edition, London, 1820 ($4,000-6,000).
Fine art books feature Pablo Picasso’s Corps Perdu, first edition, limited copy I of III, 1950 ($40,000-60,000), and Picasso’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, limited edition, 1931 ($15,000-20,000); a signed Warhol exhibition catalogue by Andy Warhol, 1971 ($1,500-2,000); and Salvador Dali’s La Divine Comdie, limited edition, 1959-63 ($1,500-2,000). Works by Alexander Calder, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, Henri Matisse, and other artists round out the offering. Many are signed by the artists, and several are in finely executed custom bindings.
