Written by Autographs Specialist Marco Tomaschett: Autograph collectors all encounter it at one time or another: the perfectly illegible autograph. The impossible convulsive…
Walt Whitman was in Boston overseeing the publication of his third edition of Leaves of Grass when he attended the trial of a man who was friendly with the Thoreaus, the…
For more than a century the state of California was thought to be an island. How? Misinformation by way of maps. In Mapping the West: America’s Westward Movement 1524-1890…
Among the highlights of today’s auction of Autographs was one of 28 copies of the act making Vermont the 14th state in the Union signed by Thomas Jefferson as Secretary…
On November 6, 2014 Swann auctioned The Latin Americana Library of Dr. W. Michael Mathes. The catalogue for the auction begins with a biography of the sale’s namesake,…
The Bay Psalm Book is often described as the first book printed in America. Issued in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1640, it was certainly the first book printed in the English…
Topping our June 19, 2014 auction of 19th & 20th Century Literature was a first American edition of Herman Melville’s seminal Moby-Dick, which brought $40,000 against a…
To celebrate the life and literary oeuvre of James Joyce on the international holiday that is Bloomsday, we are looking back on some of the many editions of James Joyce’s…
The June 3, 2014 auction of Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books is marked by a number of unique or exceedingly rare examples of cartographic material and…
