Rare Book Monthly Articles - January - 2018 Issue

The Rare Book Hub Top 500 Prices Paid at Auction in 2017

The Rare Book Hub Top 500 Prices Paid at Auction in 2017

Another year has come to a close, meaning it's time to look back at the Rare Book Hub Top 500 auction prices in the field of books and paper for the year 2017. The high end of sales was a little softer this time. Nothing matched last year's high price of $5.6 million, let alone previous years when the Bay Psalm Book and Audubon's Birds of America pushed the top price into double digit millions. This year, the best that could be mustered was $1.8 million, the lowest high in many years.   At the bottom, the slippage was more modest. Number 500 took in $71,700, a drop of 1.2% from $72,576 in...

The Year Ahead

The Year Ahead

For those involved in the world of books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera 2018 will be complex.  This is nothing new but we’ll probably see continuation of the widening market split between the worl...

How can we help in 2018?

How can we help in 2018?

How can we help in 2018?   Change is now embedded in the fields of rare books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera.  Knowledge continues to increase, even explode, and as it does, the value and relati...

AbeBook Lists Their Top 10 Most Expensive Items for 2017

AbeBook Lists Their Top 10 Most Expensive Items for 2017

"I am" seem to be the magic words for the AbeBooks annual Top 10. Last year, it was "Sam I am," this year "I think, therefore I am." Who knew Dr. Seuss and Rene Descartes had so much in common? We ...

8 Topics from the world of books you might have missed in 2017

8 Topics from the world of books you might have missed in 2017

1) KINDLE TURNS 10 - SALE OF e-BOOKS PLATEAU Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader first introduced in 2007 turned ten in 2017. Though Kindle is credited with bringing portability and broad based popularity t...

Mr Cléry and “Fake-Book”, or the Last Days of Louis XVI.

Mr Cléry and “Fake-Book”, or the Last Days of Louis XVI.

There was a post on Facebook the other day about the new evil of our times, fake news. Spreading through social networks, it has become a worldwide weapon of misinformation. This reminded me of an ...

AbeBooks to Remove eBooks from Their Website

AbeBooks to Remove eBooks from Their Website

AbeBooks recently announced to their participating booksellers that they will discontinue listing eBooks on all of their websites. This will be welcome news to those who use their site to find coll...

William Dailey:  known by the friends that he kept

William Dailey: known by the friends that he kept

     It is okay, even fine, if as a life ends, few mourn.  Most people are neither well known, nor well understood.  Hell, we often don’t know ourselves very well so thinking that others understan...

Jan. 27: Fine Books & Manuscripts including an unknown Truman archive at Potter & Potter Auctions

Jan. 27: Fine Books & Manuscripts including an unknown Truman archive at Potter & Potter Auctions

This month, Potter Potter Auctions is hosting a sale of Fine Books Manuscripts comprising 563 lots. The sale boasts an impressive range of material including Presidential autographs and documents...

Jan. 27: Presidential autographs, maps, Civil War and rare books at Case Antiques

Jan. 27: Presidential autographs, maps, Civil War and rare books at Case Antiques

Letters and books from the libraries of President George Washington and his early biographer and friend, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, constitute key lots in the Winter Case Antique...

A Book Collector on the Prowl

A Book Collector on the Prowl

Recently I purchased an obscure Munsell imprint.  Such imprints were the production of Joel Munsell of Albany.  His was a modest printing establishment, initiated in 1834, that would run beyond his...

What to Do About a "Raging Bigot" of a Bookseller?

What to Do About a "Raging Bigot" of a Bookseller?

It wasn't the best of publicity for the antiquarian book trade. Actually, it wasn't particularly a book trade issue. Every type of business has its good and its bad. Still, a story about a booksell...

Who Owns the Rosetta Stone?

Who Owns the Rosetta Stone?

There are few "manuscripts" (but not works on paper) from antiquity more important than the Rosetta Stone. Discovered in Egypt in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering the meaning of E...

eCatalogues

eCatalogues

  1 The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd 30 Antiquarian Items: Canon, Civil, Common, Ecclesiastical, Rabbinical and Roman Law E-List 30 Items Catalogue Link 2 The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd ...

Twelve New Catalogues Reviewed This Month

Twelve New Catalogues Reviewed This Month

This month we take a look at 12 new catalogues in our Reviews section. Primary Sources Uncharted Americana has published their first catalogue. Their specialty is unique or rare material in the fie...

Rare Book Monthly

  • Gonnelli
    Auction 59
    Antique prints, paintings and maps
    May 20th 2025
    Gonnelli: Pietro Aquila, Psyche and Proserpina,1690. Starting price 140€
    Gonnelli: Jacques Gamelin, Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris, 1779. Starting price 300€
    Gonnelli: Giorgio Ghisi, The final Judgement, 1680. Starting price 480€
    Gonnelli
    Auction 59
    Antique prints, paintings and maps
    May 20th 2025
    Gonnelli Goya y Lucientes Francisco, Los Proverbios.1877. Starting price 1000 €
    Gonnelli: Domenico Peruzzini, Long bearded old man, 1660. Starting price 2200€
    Gonnelli: Enea Vico, Leda and the Swan,1542. Starting price 140€
    Gonnelli
    Auction 59
    Antique prints, paintings and maps
    May 20th 2025
    Gonnelli: Andrea Del Sarto [school of], San Giovanni Battista, 1570. Starting price 25000€
    Gonnelli: Carlo Maratta, Virgin Mary and Jesus, 1660. Starting Price 1200€
    Gonnelli: Louis Brion de La Tour, Sphére de Copernic Sphere de Ptolemée / Le Systême de Ptolemée. Le Systême de Ticho-Brahe…, 1766. Starting price 180€
    Gonnelli
    Auction 59
    Antique prints, paintings and maps
    May 20th 2025
    Gonnelli: Marc’Antonio Dal Re, Ville di Delizia o Siano Palaggi Camparecci nello Stato di Milano Divise in Sei Tomi Con espressevi le Piante…, Tomo Primo, 1726. Starting price 7000€
    Gonnelli: Katsushika Hokusai, Bird on a branch, 1843. Starting price 100€
  • Ketterer Rare Books
    Auction May 26th
    Ketterer, May 26: Th. McKenney & J. Hall, History of the Indian tribes of North America, 1836-1844. Est: €50,000
    Ketterer, May 26: Biblia latina vulgata, manuscript on thin parchment, around 1250. Est: €70,000
    Ketterer, May 26: M. Beckmann, Fanferlieschen Schönefüßchen, 1924. Est: €10,000
    Ketterer Rare Books
    Auction May 26th
    Ketterer, May 26: A. Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1574. Est: €50,000
    Ketterer, May 26: M. S. Merian, Eurcarum ortus, alimentum et paradoxa metamorphosis, 1717-18. Est: €6,000
    Ketterer, May 26: PAN, 9 volumes, 1895-1900. Est: €12,000
    Ketterer Rare Books
    Auction May 26th
    Ketterer, May 26: Breviarium Romanum, Latin manuscript, 1474. Est: €15,000
    Ketterer, May 26: Quran manuscript from the Saadian period, Maghreb, 16th century. Est: €10,000
    Ketterer, May 26: E. Hemingway, The old man and the sea, 1952. First edition in first issue jacket. Presentation copy. Est: €3,000
    Ketterer Rare Books
    Auction May 26th
    Ketterer, May 26: Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De re militari libri quatuor, 1553. Est: €3,000
    Ketterer, May 26: K. Marx, Das Kapital, 1867. Est: €30,000
    Ketterer, May 26: Brassaï, Transmutations, 1967. Est: €6,000
  • Leland Little, May 21: Signed Artist Proof of the Monumental G.O.A.T.: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali.
    Leland Little, May 21: Assorted Rare Publications Related to H.P. Lovecraft, Including The Recluse Signed by Vincent Starrett.
    Leland Little, May 21: Two Issues of The Vagrant, Including the First Appearance of H.P. Lovecraft's "Dagon" in Number Eleven.
    Leland Little, May 21: Rare First Printing of Anne of Green Gables, With ALS from the Author.
    Leland Little, May 21: First Edition of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, In First Issue Jacket.
    Leland Little, May 21: The Limited Paumanok Edition of The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman.
    Leland Little, May 21: Beautifully Bound Limited Flaubert Edition of The Works of Guy de Maupassant.
    Leland Little, May 21: First Edition of Bonaparte's Celebrated American Ornithology, With Spectacular Hand-Colored Plates.
    Leland Little, May 21: A Rare Complete Set of Jardine's The Naturalist's Library, With Hand-Colored Plates.
    Leland Little, May 21: Invitation to the Lincoln-Johnson National Inaugural Ball, March 4th, 1865.
    Leland Little, May 21: A Scarce Inscribed First Edition of James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name.
    Leland Little, May 21: Picasso's Le Goût du Bonheur, Limited Edition.
  • Sotheby's
    Sell Your Fine Books & Manuscripts
    Sotheby’s: The Shem Tov Bible, 1312 | A Masterpiece from the Golden Age of Spain. Sold: 6,960,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: Ten Commandments Tablet, 300-800 CE | One of humanity's earliest and most enduring moral codes. Sold: 5,040,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: William Blake | Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Sold: 4,320,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: The Declaration of Independence | The Holt printing, the only copy in private hands. Sold: 3,360,000 USD
    Sotheby's
    Sell Your Fine Books & Manuscripts
    Sotheby’s: Thomas Taylor | The original cover art for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Sold: 1,920,000 USD
    Sotheby’s: Machiavelli | Il Principe, a previously unrecorded copy of the book where modern political thought began. Sold: 576,000 GBP
    Sotheby’s: Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura, ca. 1639, a very fine pre-publication manuscript. Sold: 381,000 GBP
    Sotheby’s: Henri Matisse | Jazz, Paris 1947, the complete portfolio. Sold: 312,000 EUR

Article Search

Archived Articles

Ask Questions