“Poetry of Flowers” autograph manuscript watercolor album. No place, ca. 1820s

This splendid album of botanical watercolors and the “poetry of flowers,” the product of years of reading, writing, and painting, was created by Lady Laetitia Emerson Tennent. She collected several hundred poems and lines of verse concerning flowers and the language of flowers written by poets from Shakespeare and Spenser to Wordsworth and other Romantics, the famous and the obscure.

$27,000

Le Juif Errant [The Wandering Jew]. Paris: Paulin, 1844-45

First edition of Sue’s The Wandering Jew.

$24,000

Walt Whitman’s Books. [Washington, D.C., 1872]

Whitman designed this rare broadside to promote his works in bookstores. The broadside advertises four of the author’s most recent publications, together with a biography of Whitman by his friend John Burroughs. Leaves of Grass was in its fifth edition by this date. Although the broadside was designed for bookstore displays, Whitman referred to it as a “show bill” in a note to W. D. O’Connor.

$22,500

Athalie. Tragédie. Paris: Denys Thierry, 1691

FIRST EDITION. Athalie, Racine’s final play, has long been considered one of the monuments of French theater.

$22,000

Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882

Presentation copy inscribed by the author and artist Celia Thaxter: “Mary Mapes Dodge with much love. Illustrated by Celia Thaxter 1882.”

$22,000

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, life among the lowly. Boston: Jewett, 1852

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING. “These books are of such paramount historical importance that it is difficult to evaluate them as literature” (Merle Johnson). “Three thousand copies were sold on the day of publication, and before its first anniversary, over 300,000 copies were sold in America … More than twenty London editions appeared in 1852, so the English audience must have been as large as the American. No other American novel has been translated into so many foreign languages” (Grolier/American).

$15,000

The Personal History of David Copperfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850

First edition. From the library of novelist E. M. Forster.

$12,500

Engineers Club Inaugural Banquet Commemorative of the Opening of the New Club House on which occasion Mr. Andrew Carnegie will be the guest of honor Monday, the ninth of December 1907. [New York: Engineer's Club], [1907]

Signed by Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie (who has signed twice), and others. This event commemorated the opening of the Engineers Club’s fabulous new home at 32 West 40th Street on Bryant Park in New York.

$12,000

De Profundis. London: Methuen, (1905)

FIRST EDITION, one of 200 copies on handmade paper. A long letter written from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis (“from the depths”) is Wilde’s apologia Wilde entrusted the manuscript to his friend and literary executor Robert Ross, who retained and eventually published it instead of giving it to Douglas.

$8,700

Catalogue of the Extraordinary Library … Consisting Entirely of Works by British and American Poetesses & Female Dramatic Writers. London: J. Davy & Sons, 1867

This is the catalogue of the pioneering Stainforth library of women’s literature, the first major auction devoted to the literary works of women writing in English from the mid-16th century to the Victorian era.

$6,500