Christie’s New York is pleased to announce our October online sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts including Americana, open for bidding from Oct 1st to the 15th, with lots beginning to close at 10am.
The sale features a curated selection of works representing over 500 years of history and the book arts, sortable by theme to allow for dynamic exploration of the sale. Take your pick from Cartography of China, a single-owner section containing an important group of early Chinese and Japanese maps of China, including handscrolls and wall maps; Color Plate & Illustrated Books featuring important illustrated works from the Nuremberg Chronicle to the mammoth Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte in a reproduction cabinet, and with a special focus on archaeological plate books of the 18th and 19th centuries documenting both the ancient Mediterranean and the Yucatan; Science and the History of Ideas, led by the first edition of Kepler’s ground (or heaven?)-breaking work outlining the first two Laws of Planetary Motion, the Astronomia nova, as well as a beautiful hand-colored copy of the 1592 edition of Ortelius’s great world atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarum, and first editions of works by Galileo, Thomas More, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, and others.
The section on Literature encompasses classic works from across two millennia, from the editio princeps of Sophocles to Shakespeare’s Second Folio and a beautiful copy of Eliot’s Middlemarch in original parts; while the Americana highlights include a rare and important treaty signed by Metacomet (aka King Philip) in 1670: an agreement that would be torn asunder with the eruption of King Philips War five years later; other intriguing items include an important document signed by George Washington in 1786 consolidating his control over the Mount Vernon estate; a letter from Henry Knox authorizing the construction of the U.S.S. Chesapeake, as well as a series of rare signed bank notes (or short-snorters) from the 1943 Tehran Conference including the signatures of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.
There are plenty of threads to pick here, with additional options to filter by topic (try the “Ancient World” filter!), type, date, and provenance—this sale features books from the estate of the bibliophile Theodore Cohn, as well as the collections of Ambassador J. William Middendorf II, Dr Leonard Hamilton, and The India House Club.
The preview exhibition will be open October 9-14, with entrance by appointment. Please contact Rhiannon Knol (rknol@christies.com) for more information about the sale.
