Leland Little Auctions, the house based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, offers to your discerning eyes this month a single-owner sale of approximately 590 lots. The sale opens with 130 lots of material relevant to members of our site comprising an excellent selection of maps, autograph and manuscript documents and letters, images, and books. The material consigned for sale is from the collection of the late Keith and Caroline Gray, and the live auction will begin at 9 AM on Saturday, November 4th. Online bidding, however, is already underway!
Though much of the material that appears at sales hosted by Leland Little is Americana, the highlight of this sale is an extremely rare British admiralty map surveyed during Darwin’s expedition: The Strait of Magalhaens commonly called Magellan Surveyed in His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle by Captain Phillip Parkerking, R. N. F. R. S., &c. and Captain Robert Fitz Roy, R. N. 1826-30, 1832-34 as lot 1019. The last bid on the map at the time of this writing was for $110.
Two Civil War images also warrant mentioning, one being an ambrotype of an armed Confederate 2nd Lieutenant (lot 1063) and the other a tintype of a Confederate First Lieutenant. Current bidding has lot 1063 at $825 and 1064 at $625.
A map by Abraham Ortelius, Septentrionalivm Regionvm Descript, is the first lot of the sale and dates from the 1570s or 1580s. Depicting the British Isles, Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and the eastern edge of Canada, the map is from the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and it features hand color and measurements of 15 3/8” by 20 3/8”. Current bidding for lot 1001 stands at $140.
Finally, a manuscript archive of twenty-two letters written to a young Confederate soldier from North Carolina will interest avid collectors of the Civil War. Often, Civil War letters coming to auction are from the combatants to their loved ones, but in this case, the situation is reversed, with updates from family and friends sent to the soldiers—it makes for a very interesting view into the period. Bidding for 1060 is currently $80.
The entire catalog of the Single-Owner Auction, The Collection of the late Keith and Caroline Gray is scheduled for 9 AM on Saturday, November 4th at Leland Little Auctions in Hillsborough, NC. The sale’s entire catalog can be viewed here.
