Rare Book of Psalms Sells for Record-Breaking $14.2 Million
A tiny book of psalms from 1640, believed to be the first book printed in what’s now the United States, sold for just under $14.2 million on Tuesday, setting an auction record for a printed book.
The Bay Psalm Book, which was auctioned at Sotheby’s in Manhattan, had a pre-sale estimate of $15 million to $30 million. A copy of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” was the previous record-holder, selling for $11.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2010.
Only 11 copies of the Bay Psalm Book survive in varying degrees of completeness. The book sold at Sotheby’s was one of two owned by Boston’s Old South Church, which voted to sell it to increase its grants and ministries. Samuel Adams was a member and Benjamin Franklin was baptized at the church, which was established in 1669.
“This is enormous for us,” said the Rev. Nancy Taylor, senior minister of the church. “It is life-changing for the ministries we can do.”
The book was bought over the phone by American businessman and philanthropist David Rubenstein, who plans to lend it to libraries around the country. The sale price included the buyer’s premium.
In April, Taylor called the book “spectacular” and said it is “arguably one of the most important books in this nation’s history.”
The church owned five copies of the 6-inch-by-5-inch book. One is now at the Library of Congress, one is at Yale University and one is at Brown University.
The book was published in Cambridge, Mass., by the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony just 20 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.
It was supposed to be a faithful translation into English of the original Hebrew psalms – puritans believed selected paraphrases would compromise their salvation. The 1,700 copies were printed on a press shipped from London.
A yellowed title page, adorned with decorative flourishes, reads: “The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Faithfully Translated into English Metre.” At the bottom, it says: “Imprinted 1640.”
Historians believe an almanac may have come off the press before the Bay Psalm Book. But the chief of rare books and special collections at the Library of Congress, Mark Dimunation, has said the almanac was more of a pamphlet or a broadsheet than a book. No copy of the almanac exists today. Dimunation noted that in the Americas, in general, books were printed in what is now Mexico as early as 1539.
“American poetry, American spirituality and the printed page all kind of combine and find themselves located in a single volume,” Dimunation said of the Bay Psalm Book.
The last time a copy came on the auction block, in 1947, it sold for a record auction price of $151,000, surpassing auction prices for the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio and “Birds of America.”
The auction record for any book goes to the Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer, a personal notebook of scientific writings and diagrams. It sold for $30.8 million at Christie’s auction house in 1994.
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing 2007 - 18 November 2013
It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to the Nobel Prize winning author and Booktrust President Doris Lessing, who died aged 94 this weekend.
She was a brave novelist, who made an immense contribution to the literary world, and we are forever grateful for the support she gave us in encouraging reading and writing.
Lessing completed more than 50 novels during her lifetime, spanning a broad spectrum of politics, science and feminism. Her longest and best-known work, The Golden Notebook, explored the layers of one woman's personality, leading her to become a trailblazer of the feminist movement. She, however, felt that her 1970s science fiction series, Canopus in Argus, was her best work.
I read because I adored it, and still do. Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe (issues of post-colonial politics were very present in her novels), Lessing dropped out of school at 13, and took to ordering parcels of books from England. From Dickens and Kipling, she fed her imagination, and was soon making up bedtime stories for her brother - they provided her with an escape. When she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1994 she was asked if she read as a child out of boredom, to which she responded 'No, I read because I adored it, and still do'.
She was heavily decorated with awards and prizes, including the David Cohen Prize in 2001, which is now one of Booktrust's portfolio of managed prizes. In 2007, she arrived at her North London home to find a sea of reporters and photographers on her doorstep, following the announcement of her as as the oldest person to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In typical Lessing fashion, she was unimpressed by the intrusion, encumbered as she was with heavy shopping bags, and merely offered the words 'Oh Christ!' to reporters!
[Top]Era ends: Liquidation sale at Berkeley’s Serendipity Books
Source: Berkeleyside
November 7, 2013 11:00 am by Frances Dinkelspiel
Photo: Scott Brown
When Peter Howard, the owner of Serendipity Books, died in March 2011, he left behind more than one million books crammed into his two-level store on University Avenue in Berkeley with the oak barrel hanging out front.
Howard’s collection of rare and antique books was considered one of the best in the country; he often sold books and manuscripts to places like the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley or the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
The collection included so many amazing items that Bonham’s held six different auctions of his holdings, selling off early editions of John Steinbeck, a broadside by James Joyce, many modern first editions, early baseball memorabilia — even poet Carl Sandburg’s guitar.
But there are still books left to sell. More than 100,000 books, in fact.
On Saturday at 10 a.m., the doors of Serendipity Books at 1201 University Ave. will open for what will surely be one of Berkeley’s most memorable used-book fairs. Eureka Books of Eureka, California, acquired the remainder of the Serendipity collection, and will sell the books on most weekends through Dec. 15. The books start out at $5 early in the sale, and will drop to $1 each in mid-December.
“It was a one of a kind place,” said Scott Brown, the co-owner of Eureka Books, who was also a longtime Serendipity customer. “I don’t think there is another bookstore like Serendipity around.”
The bookstore was a jumble of books stacked high in shelves and in boxes and bags when Howard, 72, died of pancreatic cancer. The auctioneers moved out most of the books, but the store was still a wreck when Eureka Books came in to sort, said Brown. Workers spent weeks reassembling the place.
The mystery section of the second floor was virtually impassable, with bags of books blocking the floor. Many books were still stacked up on high shelves and were unreachable; the Eureka staff brought them down to viewing height. The shelves in the front room were almost empty, but now have been refilled with books from other parts of the store. (The shelves and other fixtures are also for sale.)
“It would not be wrong to say there were 1,000 bags and boxes filled with books in the store,” said Brown. “By the time we unpacked those I would say the whole ground floor was full again.”
Even though the best books were auctioned off, many gems remain, said Brown. There will be an entire section of 18th- and 19th-century leather books on sale for $5.
“While there are no $1,000 books laying around, we left many, many things that were priced in the hundreds,” said Brown.
Howard’s daughters plan to keep the University Avenue building and find a new tenant after the sale, said Brown. They donated Howard’s correspondence with literary luminaries like J. D. Salinger, Graham Greene and Larry McMurtry to the Lilly Library, he said.
A number of leather-bound old books will be on sale for $5 at the Serendipity Books liquidation sale.
Howard started Serendipity Books in 1967 in a small store on Shattuck Avenue and moved to the University Avenue location in 1986. Howard collected a voluminous number of books – he often bought individual’s entire collections. He had a reputation as an astute rare-book dealer. He discovered and saved many important manuscript collections, as well as collecting works by both well-known and lesser-known writers. He consulted with major libraries on what to buy and how much to bid.
“He was one of the major antiquarian book dealers of our time,” said Victoria Shoemaker, a literary agent, close friend and former neighbor of Howard’s.
Howard made some notable purchases in his lengthy career as a bookseller.
In the late 1990s, he bought the 18,000-volume collection of Carter Burden, a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and a progressive New York politician and businessman. The size of the collection prompted Howard to install space-saving compact shelving, making Serendipity the only bookstore in the world to have such shelving.
In 1991, Howard was offered the archives of Thomas M. Jackson, an Oakland grocer who had served as secretary for the California chapter of the NAACP from 1910 and 1940. After Jackson died, in 1963, someone took his papers to the Berkeley dump. Someone else rescued them and asked Howard to help them find a proper home. Howard sold the papers to the Bancroft Library.
Later in that decade, someone found 946 letters exchanged between two Japanese-American teenagers who met at an internment camp in Utah. Tamaki Tsubokura and David Hisato Yamate were separated for a few years during the war, and they wrote to one another frequently. These letters were also dumped at the Berkeley landfill and later rescued. Howard brokered their sale to the University of Utah.
One indication of the reverence in which Howard was held by the rare-book community came every two years around the time of the Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco. Howard would throw a huge party at Serendipity Books the Wednesday before the fair. He would clear the books in his store out of the aisles and off of the tables, tent-over the parking lot, and have Poulet cater the meal. He would have a suckling pig, and the printer, Alistair Johnson, would print up the menu, said Dahm. The party was so popular that the store and tent were jammed.
The liquidation sale will be held from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. almost every weekend through Dec. 15th. Check Here for schedule.
All books will be $5 on Nov. 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, and 17th. Then the price will drop to $3 each book on Nov. 21, 22, 23, and Dec. 5, 6, and 7. The prices drop to $1 on Dec. 12, 13, 14, and 15th.
Visit the Serendipity Books Liquidation sale Facebook page.
[Top]The Lovely Island of Sans Serriffe
Source: Wikipedia
San Serriffe is a fictional island nation created for April Fools' Day, 1977, by Britain's Guardian newspaper.[1] An elaborate description of the nation, using puns and plays on words relating to typography (such as "sans-serif" and names of common fonts), was reported as legitimate news. Because typographic terminology had not yet spread through widespread use of desktop publishing and word processing software, these jokes were easily missed by the general public, and many readers were fooled.
A seven-page hoax supplement appeared in The Guardian on 1 April 1977, published in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the island's independence, complete with themed advertisements from major companies. The original idea was to place the island in the Atlantic Ocean near Tenerife, but because of the ground collision of two Boeing 747s there a few days before publication it was moved to the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles Islands.
There is much more to this article plus follow up articles in the years since publication of the April fools edition.
You can read more about it: HERE
[Top]Unique collection of first edition books from Wind in the Willows and Gulliver’s Travels illustrator is auctioned
Arthur Rackham
A one off collection of first edition books by the celebrated 20th century illustrator goes under the hammer at Sworders’ Fine Art Auctioneers next week.
The collection is expected to fetch up to £30,000 and contains 26 books – all first editions.
Twenty-one of them are signed and inscribed with humorous pen and ink drawings by Rackham. He was widely regarded as one of the leading illustrators in the first 20 years of the last century when high quality illustrated books were in great demand in what was considered to be the ‘golden age’ of such work.
The books were all given as presents to his wife’s sister and her husband, and handed down through the family who live on the Essex/Hertfordshire border. Each book has a cloth cover with gilt embossed titles and all are in a good condition.
They’re being auctioned at the Books, Prints and Maps sale on Tuesday, November 12 at Sworders’ auction rooms in Stansted Mountfitchet.
Sworders’ managing director, Guy Schooling said: “We are very excited to be selling what we believe to be a unique collection of books. The vignettes are absolutely exquisite. They’re of a high quality and packed with humour. It’s a rare find.”
The books are being auctioned separately and prices range from £800 to £1,500.
Since his death in 1939 Rackham’s work has grown in popularity and his images have been widely used in the greeting card industry. His original drawings are highly sought after and there is expected to be a lot of interest in the auction next week. He illustrated classics such as A Christmas Carol, Wind in the Willows, and Gulliver’s Travels.
Stansted Mountfitchet Saleroom
GES and Sons Limited
Cambridge Road
Stansted Mountfitchet
Essex
CM24 8GE
Tel: 01279 817778
Fax: 01279 817779
Email: auctions@sworder.co.uk
Telephone Bidding
We can provide telephone bidding for higher value lots. This service is only available for our Country House and Specialist Sales and only on lots with an estimate of £500 or more.
Please phone us on 01279 817778 to request a telephone bid. The number of lines is limited so we would advise booking as early as possible. We require requests before 4pm the day before the sale. We cannot organise telephone bidding on the day of the sale.
We take every care to ensure the smooth running of this service but we cannot be held liable if your bids are missed for any reason. We advise leaving a maximum covering bid in case we are unable to contact you by telephone.
Online bidding
The latest method which is rapidly growing in popularity and allows you to participate in the auction live via your computer.
For our specialist sales, we offer a live online bidding service via the-saleroom.com for bidders who cannot attend the sale.
To bid online you need to register at www.the-saleroom.com
[Top]Exploding the Myth of Comic Book Collecting
I just came across this blog today with some interesting articles. The blog is by a gentleman who describes himself as, "I'm an Author, Playwright, Creative Consultant, Raconteur, Ne'er-Do-Well, Earth Rooster and Primate. Probably not in that order."
The particular article of interest to me is about the comic book collector. It is a good read. Here is a short quote:
If I told one customer, I told a thousand, "Look, if you're buying that book, expecting it to go up in value, then you're doing it wrong. It doesn't work like that. I've sold a hundred of those books already, to people just like you. They are all bagging and boarding them up as we speak. In twenty years, you're all going to whip out your comic books and say, 'Now how much will you give me?' and there will be no takers, because the only people who bought them in the first place already HAVE them."
Check out the full article Here: http://marktheaginghipster.blogspot.com/2013_01_01_archive.html
[Top]Rare book auction includes the white whale of first editions
Source: Melville House
by Julia Fleischaker
Swann Auction Galleries has listed an extremely rare first edition of Moby-Dick.
Now’s your chance to own the white whale of rare literature! A first edition copy of Moby-Dick: or, The Whale, including extremely rare white endpapers is up for auction at Swann Auction Galleries. Part of their 19th and 20th Century Literature Auction, the edition is expected to go for a mere $35,000-$50,000.
Stephen J. Gertz at BookTryst notes that these endpapers add “upwards of $20,000 to the value of a standard, first American edition, first issue copy with orange endpapers.” So what makes these endpapers so special? According to this collectibles website, “In 1853 a fire at Harpers - the book’s publisher - destroyed all but around 60 copies, making the edition extremely rare. This example is one of only two known that feature white endpapers, further enhancing its desirability.”
Herman Melville isn’t the only bold-faced named included in the auction. Paul Fraser Collectibles takes note of some of the other interesting items:
A signed first edition of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is also featured with an estimate of $18,000-25,000. It is inscribed: “For Jules and Joyce and also Joan with love John Steinbeck”.
It features the rare flying pig illustration that Steinbeck reserved for close friends. Jules Buck was a movie producer with whom Steinbeck worked on a screenplay that became Eli Kazan’s Viva Zapata.
The dust jacket is in excellent condition with virtually no rubbing or wear, and features the original price of $2.75.
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is offered as a first edition, with the original cloth-backed patterned boards and dust jacket. A masterpiece of modernism, the book relates the story of the Compson family – formerly wealthy southern aristocrats who have fallen on hard times.
The edition has been expertly repaired on areas of the spine, panel and folds and features a small split to the lower front hinge. It is expected to bring $15,000-20,000.
Other books include an inscribed first edition and one of only 500 copies of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations ($6,000-$9,000), and a first edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter ($6,000-$9,000).
Setting your budget under a grand? There are plenty of options: first editions of Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, an inscribed Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and In Cold Blood, signed by Truman Capote, are just some of the titles being estimated at under $1,000.
The auction starts on November 21, and Swann Galleries lets you bid live online, over email, or on the phone, so don’t forget!
From Swann’s description of Lot 197:
“ONLY FOUND ANOTHER ORPHAN” MELVILLE, HERMAN.Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 12mo, original black cloth, boards slightly bowed, blind-stamped with heavy rule frame and publisher’s circular device at center of each cover, minor chipping to spine ends, short fray along front joint; white endpapers, double flyleaves at front and back, usual scattered light foxing, 6-page publisher’s advertisement at end, penciled ownership signature on front free endpaper; preserved in 1/4 morocco gilt-lettered drop-back cloth box. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851
Estimate $35,000 - 50,000
unsophisticated copy of the first american edition, first state binding, containing thirty-five passages and the Epilogue omitted from the English edition (published a month earlier). Melville himself famously described his book thus: ‘It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.’
Julia Fleischaker is Melville House's director of publicity.
[Top]