The Lord of the Rings. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954-1955

FIRST EDITIONS. This is a very attractive set of the celebrated Lord of the Rings trilogy. The size of the edition was small: The Fellowship of the Ring (3000 copies), The Two Towers (3250 copies), and The Return of the King (7000 copies).

$42,500

A Room of One’s Own. New York: The Fountain Press; London: Hogarth Press, 1929

FIRST EDITION, preceding the trade edition. One of 492 copies signed by Virginia Woolf, this copy noted as “out of series’ on the limitation page. This is a very rare presentation copy of Woolf’s landmark feminist text. Woolf has inscribed and signed the book in purple ink to Cambridge philosopher R. B. Braithwaite.

$42,000

Magnificent Beecher Family Photograph Collection. Various places, 1850s-1880s

The collection: $42,000

“Democracy” Autograph Manuscript. No place, [c. 1867-70]

Walt Whitman on “the great height & beauty & practical fibre of American Democracy.” Whitman likely wrote this unpublished manuscript during the composition of his Democratic Vistas (1871).

$37,500

Tales. London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845

FIRST EDITION, ENGLISH ISSUE with the cancel London title page. This is an excellent copy of one of the rarest forms of Poe’s tales, issued in the original cloth from the American sheets with a London title page.

on hold

A Tale of Two Cities. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859

FIRST EDITION, FIRST BINDING, FIRST PRINTING (with page 213 mis-numbered 113 and sig. b present on the list of illustrations, points that were corrected in later copies of this edition).

$35,000

Julius Caesar. A Tragedy. London: for Hen. Heringman and R. Bentley, 1684

FIRST QUARTO EDITION of Julius Caesar, the first separate edition of one of Shakespeare’s best-known and most-performed plays.

$35,000

Two autograph manuscripts signed: Autograph manuscript on the American individual beginning “Or are you one ambitious of great deeds” [and] Autograph manuscript poem fragment signed “Kentucky”. No place, c. 1862

This leaf contains two wonderful Whitman manuscripts. The first is an unpublished manuscript in which Whitman discusses two of the great themes of his writing: the work of strengthening, purifying, and completing oneself and the place of the individual in American democracy. The second, written on the verso of “Or are you ambitious” manuscript, is an unpublished working manuscript from Whitman’s Civil War poem “Kentucky.”

$28,000

The National Era. Vols. IV-X. Washington, January 1850 – December 1856

This is a tremendous seven-year run of the weekly broadsheet The National Era, one of the leading abolitionist newspapers. This massive run of the National Era captures the white-hot debate surrounding slavery that would lead to the Civil War. Original contributions to the Era, letters from correspondents around the country, national and state legislation, and news articles report on every aspect of slavery and the abolition movement. Countless leading figures in American politics, literature, religion, education, and social reform weigh in on slavery and other American affairs in these pages.

on hold: $28,000

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade). New York: Webster, 1885

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION in the publisher’s deluxe binding. This copy has the rare first state of the illustration on p. 283, as well as the other earliest points described in BAL.

$27,500