The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.. London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776-1788

First editions of all six volumes of the most celebrated historical work in English literature. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall covers the thirteen centuries from the age of Trajan to the fall of Constantinople with unmatched erudition, clarity, and organization. “Gibbon brought a width of vision and a critical mastery of the available sources which have not been equaled to this day; and the result was clothed in an inimitable prose” (PMM).

$28,000

“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

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840

First edition of Poe’s first published collection of tales, one of only 750 sets printed. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains many of Poe’s finest tales including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “MS. Found in a Bottle.”

$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

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

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

Autograph manuscript on Elias Hicks. No place, [ca. 1880]

In this fine working manuscript Whitman reflects on the life of Elias Hicks, a major spiritual influence on the poet. The spellbinding Quaker preacher was a key source of Whitman’s prophetic style and poetic vision. “Hicks’s presence persisted in Whitman’s passions of oratory and ‘natural eloquence’ in the loosely cadenced verse of Leaves of Grass. … In the making of a poet’s vision of reality and identity Hicks preceded Emerson and outlasted him” (Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman).

$22,000

Autograph note signed to Robert Watt with original albumen print photograph. No place, July 16, 1874

Mark Twain the humorist. Samuel Clemens sent this delightful humorous note with the accompanying half- length standing portrait of the debonair author.

$18,000

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