Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885

First American edition, in publisher’s morocco with the rare first state of the illustration on p. 283.

$30,000

Autograph letter signed to Sophia Hawthorne. Andover, 22 June 1863

Harriet Beecher Stowe arranges a visit to Hawthorne’s Concord home. Stowe wrote this letter the year before Nathaniel Hawthorne’s death. She tells Hawthorne’s wife Sophia,

“Mr. Stowe & I have long desired to renew our acquaintance with you, but Concord is rather too far off for a card-case call & this leads me to say that on Sunday next we shall pass your house on our way to a friends’ with whom we pass Sunday, & we propose to ourselves then the pleasure of calling & seeing you & Mr. Hawthorne & your family once more.”

$22,500

American Mahogany Butler’s Desk from the Holmes family home at 296 Beacon Street, Boston. American, ca. 1830

Justice Holmes’s butler’s desk from the family home on Beacon Street.

$22,000

Buildings of [the] Fair Heirs in San Francisco. Original photographs of the pre-earthquake real estate holdings of the heirs of James Graham Fair.. San Francisco, 1901-1905

A real estate tycoon’s San Francisco: this album documents approximately forty downtown San Francisco real estate holdings of the heirs of real estate, silver, and railroad magnate James Graham Fair. This album belonged to Fair’s daughter Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt, first wife of William K. Vanderbilt II.

$22,000

Important Pair of Daguerreotypes: Black Caregiver with White Baby and the Child’s Parents. Talbot County, Maryland or Texas, c. 1853

This striking pair of daguerreotypes evokes the complex relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers in the American South, especially between white families and the trusted women who cared for their children.

the pair: $18,500

Some Account of the Pennsylvania Hospital; From its First Rise, to the Beginning of the Fifth Month, called May, 1754. Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1754

FIRST EDITION of Benjamin Franklin’s account of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital established in the British colonies, co-founded by Franklin with his friend Dr. Thomas Bond. It remains a leading medical institution in Philadelphia.

$17,500

A collection of all six portraits of the last surviving veterans of the American Revolution. Hartford: Moore, 1864

These is a complete collection of original carte de visite photographs of all six Revolutionary War veterans still surviving in 1864: William Hutchings (aged 100), Samuel Downing (aged 102), Daniel Waldo (aged 102), Adam Link (aged 102), Alexander Millener (aka Muroney) (aged 104), and Lemuel Cook (aged 105). A seventh man, James Barham, was believed to be alive but could not be located for the series.

$15,000

Manuscript From The Life of Washington. No Place, ca. 1859

This is a long, revised autograph manuscript for Washington Irving’s The Life of George Washington. This section of the monumental biography presents the growing schism between Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Hamilton, as Washington was considering standing for re-election for a second term. The manuscript, which includes most of chapter 16 of the final volume, opens with Washington reading Jefferson’s letter accusing Hamilton and his followers of using the new Constitution “only as a step to an English Constitution.” It concludes with Washington’s attempts at reconciliation, hoping that “there may be mutual forbearance and temporizing yielding on all sides. Without these I do not see how the reins of government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved.”

$15,000

A collection of four printed and manuscript items relating to the end of slavery in New York. New York, 1816-1840

This collection documents the struggle to end slavery in New York in the early nineteenth century.

4 items: $12,500

The Home of Washington, as it appeared May 14th 1859. Baltimore, H.E. Hoyt & Co., 1859

The earliest dated photograph of Mount Vernon, this is one of the very earliest known photographs of George Washington’s home.

$12,500