Printed Books

 including illustrated books
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Chronology : 1430-1459  1460-1479  1520-1539  17th century  1620-1629  1640-1649  1680-1699  1820-1829  1830-1839  1907

1455 Gutenberg Bible
1987 SOLD for $ 5.4M including premium by Christie's

Link to Christie's Books & Manuscripts department

1477 Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
1998 SOLD for £ 4.6M (including premium ?) by Christie's

Post sale report by BBC News.

1477 Ptolemy's Cosmographia
2006 SOLD for £ 2.14M including premium by Sotheby's

Link to catalogue.

1482 The Torah of the Quattrocento
2014 SOLD 2.8 M€ including premium

The Torah is a holy text whose writing on scroll must follow a meticulous rite. The invention of printing did however encourage the publication of Jewish books.

The Mishneh Torah is not for ritual use. This is a repetition of the Torah. One of them handwritten ​​in Italy around 1460 in a book format was discussed in this column one year ago. Beautifully illuminated, it was made at a time when printing in Hebrew characters was not yet developed.

This prestigious book whose other volume is kept by the Vatican Library was withdrawn just before the auction to be sold jointly to the Israel Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jews quickly feel the need of the printed book to share their learning. It is not a coincidence that their earliest printed book is not a Torah but a comment by Rashi. It was edited in Reggio di Calabria in 1475.

The most important Jewish book printed at that time is also not ritual. Made in Bologna in 1482, it was the first one to gather the five books of the Pentateuch, on 438 pages. The center of the page displays the sacred text which is surrounded by Rashi's comments. This book also includes some Hebrew words illuminated in gold on a dark blue background.

A copy on vellum is estimated € 1M for sale by Christie's in Paris on April 30. Here is the link to the Bloomberg story releasing this information.

POST SALE COMMENT

There was no doubt that this book is exceptional. It was sold for € 2.8M including premium.

​1520-1539 The Princeps Edition of the Talmud
​2015 SOLD for $ 9.3M including premium

The Jews understood that the sacred texts require commentaries. These scholarly tractates constitute the Talmud. The two main collections are named the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. They started from the antique oral traditions.

The invention of printing was not immediately applied to Hebrew types. In Italy, some Christian illuminators were able to continue their business during the last decades of the fifteenth century by adapting their expertise to the copy of Hebrew books.

The first books printed in Hebrew also appeared in Italy. A Mishneh Torah printed in Bologna in 1482 was sold for € 2.8 million including premium by Christie's on April 30, 2014. The texts are cleverly arranged in blocks for an easy comparison within the page between the basic text and its commentaries. There is nothing similar in the Christian culture as far as I know.

Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer in Venice, obtained in 1515 the permission to print in Hebrew. His princeps editions of the Talmud are a major project carried out in three phases : the Babylonian Talmud from 1520 to 1523, the Talmud of Jerusalem in 1522 and 1523 and additional tractates from 1525 to 1539 that went to complete his Babylonian Talmud.

The result is an achievement. The composition continues the tradition of confrontational blocks with such skill that they will serve for centuries as a prototype for further printed editions of the Talmud. The rabbinical sources are carefully selected and considered as indisputable. The book is printed on a beautiful heavy paper.

Westminster Abbey once owned the finest surviving copy of the Babylonian Talmud of Bomberg, complete of its 3472 leaves of great freshness, in nine volumes 39 x 27 cm in a period binding. When he was assembling his Valmadonna Trust Library, the collector Jack Lunzer managed to acquire this set by providing in exchange a valuable old charter of the abbey.

The Bomberg Talmud of the Valmadonna Trust Library is estimated $ 5M for sale by Sotheby's in New York on December 22, lot 12.

The Valmadonna collection was exhibited at Sotheby's in February 2009. The video below, which is an introduction to the 11000 pieces displayed in this exhibition, demonstrates convincingly why the Bomberg Talmud is the most important jewel in this stunning library.

​1613 The Garden of Eichstätt
​2016 SOLD for £ 1.93M including premium

The plant is the basic element of the apothecary. Medical universities maintain gardens to analyse their features. Naturalists are then interested in their variety and undertake classifications. The first flower gardens designed for sole pleasure appear around 1600.

The prince-bishop of Eichstätt is passionate about flowers. His garden has eight sections or terraces where plants are grouped according to their origin. He entrusts the maintenance of the garden and the drawings of the plants to a botanist-apothecary based in Nuremberg, Basilius Besler.

Besler prepares 366 plates with an average of three plants per page. They are classified by season and the reader can compare the phases of a plant including bulb, flower and fruit. The Hortus Eystettensis is issued in 300 copies in 1613, in a very large format 54 x 42 cm. The deluxe version is only printed on one side to avoid the shadow of the back, and hand colored. It may be the most expensive book of its time.

A few copies began circulating in Rome in the circle of the Accademia dei Lincei. This academy is one of the earliest scientific societies in the modern sense of that wording. Its goal is to understand nature from an objective observation. In 1611, the Accademia welcomes into its ranks Galileo and also Faber, the director of the papal botanical garden.

It was known that one of the last sets of uncolored plates of the Hortus Eystettensis was purchased for the use of Faber in 1617. We did not know more. It is probably this one that has just surfaced.

On July 13 in London, Christie's sells that deluxe copy, lot 173estimated £ 800K. It is complete of Besler's 366 plates, without the additional botanical text. Before it got its binding, this copy was supplemented with fifteen drawings and one print of a rare plant that was the pride of the garden of Cardinal Farnese. This 1619 dated plate is dedicated to Faber. The whole book was colored by a single hand.

Let us comment the considerable interest of the Roman Catholic aristocracy for flowers. The preparation of the Hortus Eystettensis is indeed contemporary to the artistic study of flowers executed throughout the summer of 1606 by Jan Brueghel from the incitement of the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan.

Please watch the video shared by Christie's :

1623 Shakespeare's First Folio
2001 SOLD for $ 6.2M including premium by Christie's

Link to catalogue.

1623 The Quadricentennial of Shakespeare's Death
2016 SOLD for £ 1.87M including premium

For celebrating the 400th year after Shakespeare's death, Christie's devotes a full auction session to the first four Folios in London on May 25.

The First Folio, published in 1623, is of utmost importance in the history of literature since it is the first edition for 18 of the 36 collected plays. It is a beautiful edition 30 x 20 cm for which the texts have been prepared with great care. A complete copy in splendid condition was sold for $ 6.2 million including premium by Christie's on 8 October 2001 over a lower estimate of $ 2M.

The example offered in the next sale was not yet known to scholars. It is resurfacing from the descendance of a prominent bibliophile who was also a scientist of the Enlightenment. Untouched for two centuries, the book has kept a remarkably fresh condition but the nine preamble leaves are missing and several repairs are announced in the catalog. It is estimated £ 800K, lot 101.

The Second Folio, published for the first time in 1632, is very close to the First Folio with respect to the Shakespearean corpus and the bibliophile had perhaps not desired to own it. The copy for sale atlot 102, printed circa 1641, comes from another source. It is estimated £ 180K.

The other two books were in the same collection as lot 101. The Third Folio was published in 1664. This copy in an exceptionally fresh preservation is estimated £ 300K, lot 103. This edition is very rare. At lot 104 the Fourth Folio, dated 1685, is estimated £ 15K.

RESULTS INCLUDING PREMIUM :
First Folio : £ 1.87M
Second Folio : £ 195K
Third Folio : £ 360K
Fourth Folio : £ 47K

I invite you to watch the video shared by Christie's to introduce the First Folio of the next sale:

1640 Psalms for a New World
2013 SOLD 14.2 M$ including premium

The Puritans fleeing the England of the Stuarts built in Massachusetts Bay the communities that could meet their religious and social ideals. One of the villages, named Cambridge in 1638, specifically had a cultural vocation. Harvard College was founded there in 1636.

The singing of the psalms is a strong element of their liturgy, linking together the first parishioners of that region still in wilderness. Their scholars do not want to use the available British translations. Their new version in English verse takes the excuse of a need to be closer to the original Hebrew text. It was actually a remarkable collective work, and the first sign of their independence from the Church of England.

They now have to publish this text. In London, Josse Glover supports the project and in turn leaves to America in 1638. He did not reach it, but he was accompanied by Stephen Day (or Daye), a locksmith who will be the first printer in New England.

Currently known by the nickname Bay Psalm Book, The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre is printed by Day in 1640 in Cambridge and sold by the earliest bookseller of New England, Hezekiah Usher.

The original edition consisted of 1700 copies. For a century, the book was highly successful and often reprinted. Because of its liturgical use, most copies were damaged and destroyed.

The arrival at auction of a copy in good condition of the 1640 edition is an event of the utmost importance for American bibliophiles and patriots. In 1947, one of them went to be more expensive than the Old Testament of the Gutenberg Bible.

Another one is estimated $ 15M to 30M, for sale by Sotheby's in New York on November 26. Here is the link to the home page of the sale. The seller is the Old South Church in Boston which keeps another copy in a similar condition.

POST SALE COMMENT

The Bay Psalm Book was sold for $ 14.2M including premium.

I invite you to play the video shared by Sotheby's :

​1687 The Universal Philosophy revealed to the World
​2016 SOLD for $ 3.7M including premium

Isaac Newton was the most brilliant scientific innovator of all time. Late in his life he laid down the rules that had guided his unprecedented method. One of these rules summarizes in a simple sentence how he created the modern physics : to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

One of his outstanding skills was to develop mathematical methods of high complexity to analyze and support his own physical theories. Even before he was 30, he compared the motion of the planets and the fall of the bodies. Essentially preoccupied with his own understanding of the mechanism of the universe, he published sparingly.

In 1684 in London, the scientists of the Royal Society challenged themselves to find the mathematical formulation of the law of motion of the planets described by Kepler. All failed. Halley visits Newton in Cambridge. He is stunned : Newton knows the solution but has lost his calculation notes. The orbital movement of a celestial body is an ellipse whose position of the other body is one of the foci.

The scientific stake is highly important and Halley manages to persuade Newton to disclose in their entirety his results concerning the law of universal gravitation. Edited and financed by Halley, Newton's Latin book entitled Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is published in 1687 with the imprimatur of the Royal Society.

The book is difficult in the opinion of the author himself and the circulation probably did not exceed 300 copies but it is of such scientific importance that Halley and Newton took care of organizing their sale through booksellers. One of them named Samuel Smith is more specifically entrusted to the supply onto the Continent and receives about 50 copies for that purpose.

On December 14 in New York, Christie's sells a copy in a luxury binding in inlaid morocco, presented in that state by Smith to an unidentified recipient. It is estimated $ 1M, lot 167.

Another association copy with a binding of a comparable luxury is known. It was offered to King James II, patron of the Royal Society. This book was sold for $ 2.5M including premium by Christie's on December 6, 2013 over a lower estimate of $ 400K.

1827-1838 Audubon by Subscription
2010 SOLD 7.3 M£ including premium

Two books, or better two events, from a single collection are waiting for bibliophiles in the sale at Sotheby's in London on December 7: the First Folio of Shakespeare and Audubon's Birds of America.

Let's start with the birds. We already know them in the Prints group. Here is (slightly modified) how I summarized the importance of this work:

Lovers of top auctions remember the outstanding results obtained by Christie's in New York on the major work of Audubon, The Birds of America. The four volumes contain 435 hand colored etchings.

These prints are in double elephant folio size, the largest known format for an illustrated book: 100 x 67 cm. The gigantic size is related to the goal that John James Audubon managed for the great work of his life: he wanted all his birds being displayed in their natural habitat in life size, even for the largest. This American had to travel to England to find a publisher: he was Robert Havell, in London. The publication spanned twelve years (1827-1838). Such a duration was not unusual at this time for ambitious books.

The highest price achieved at Christie's, $ 8.8 million including premium, was recorded on March 10, 2000 on a copy constituted by subscription, whose colors remained remarkably fresh.

The copy for sale by Sotheby's, estimated £ 4M, has similar qualities. It was collected by the eleventh subscriber in Audubon's ledger, a paleobotanist from Edinburgh who was convinced of the value of the project during a wine party with the author.

POST SALE COMMENT

Great success for this outstanding book: £ 7.3 million including premium.

1827-1838 The Grocer of Louisville
2019 SOLD for $ 6.6M including premium

In 1807 two young Frenchmen open a general store in Louisville, Kentucky. Jean-Jacques Audubon cannot concentrate on his work. He is passionate about hunting and bird watching. He takes the US citizenship in 1812 and anglicizes his first name as John James.

He is early trained in taxidermy and participates in one of the earliest attempts of bird ringing. His method is unprecedented. He kills his specimen with a shotgun and straightens it in a natural pose with a wire. Then he draws it life size, often with its female or its prey. He never draws from a stuffed bird.

Audubon goes bankrupt in 1819. Against the advice of his friends but with the support of his wife, he decides to publish his work. American learned societies repel this man from the woods who had ridiculed one of their honorable fellows. In 1826, right in the romantic period, he arrives in England with his collection of watercolors.

The work to be done is colossal. He wants to maintain the 97 x 66 cm format of his drawing sheets but no book has ever been printed in such a big size. The plates should be colored one by one by hand. The only solution is the subscription. He finds in Edinburgh in 1827 a printer, Lizars, to carry out the work. A first booklet of 10 plates, numbered from I to X, is prepared.

There will be no second issue by Lizars, following a strike of the colorists. The business is now entrusted to Havell in London, until the 435th and final plate in 1838. The five volumes of texts are published separately in octavo format between 1831 and 1839.

On December 18 in New York, Sotheby's sells a complete set, in very good condition despite the obscuring of some captions by the binding. It was formed for the subscription of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society received by Audubon in April 1827. Plates I, III, and V to X are in the first state printed by Lizars.

This lot was sold for £ 1.76M including premium by Sotheby's on June 21, 1990. It is now estimated $ 6M, lot 1. Please watch the video shared by the auction house.

The complete copy assembled around 1838 for the Duke of Portland with some remaining stock includes all the first ten plates in the Lizars edition and is in perfect condition. It was sold for $ 9.7M including premium by Christie's on June 14, 2018. A full set in its original binding, resulting from one of the very first subscriptions, was sold for £ 7.3M including premium by Sotheby's on December 7, 2010.

​1838 The Birds of the Duke of Portland
2018 SOLD for $ 9.7M including premium

The copy of The Birds of America by Audubon owned until 2012 by the Dukes of Portland is one of the finest in existence. It was sold for $ 8M including premium by Christie's in New York on January 20, 2012, lot 1.

It is now estimated $ 8M for sale in the same auction room on June 14 as lot 1, as a charity to benefit the conservation of the natural environment.

I narrated it as follows in 2012 :

The complete version of Audubon's The Birds of America, published in London, includes 435 plates engraved from 1827 to 1838, hand-colored from the watercolors of the author and bound in four volumes. Made in a quite large 'double elephant' folio format 98 x 65 cm, it is the masterpiece of illustrated books. All birds were carefully illustrated in life size.

The introduction at auction of a full version in good condition is an event. Two of these prestigious copies came from original deliveries by subscription. They were respectively sold for $ 8.8 million including premium at Christie's on March 10, 2000 and for £ 7.3 million including premium by Sotheby's on December 7, 2010.

At the end of the operation, Audubon's list included 161 subscribers. Its printers, Lizars and Havell, had planned it slightly wider, and it is likely that a few remaining copies have been assembled in volumes in 1838 for new customers while retaining the chronological order of publication.

The copy from the library of the Dukes of Portland is probably one of those assembled without subscription, and it remained in exceptionally fine condition. It may be considered like an original edition by the bibliophiles as most of the first plates are in first state, as evidenced by watermarks and through the variants in the legends. The five octavo volumes of texts are included in the lot.

1907-1930 The Cultural Heritage of the American Indians
2012 SOLD 2.9 M$ including premium

The work of Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, should be part of the cultural heritage of humanity. Without him, two worlds would never have met: the authentic traditions of American Indians, and photography.

When Curtis began to visit the western America, the tribal populations had declined dramatically, and many of them were snapped up by other forms of civilization. This is the end of an era.

When Curtis began recording thousands of photographs, this technique was already fully mastered. The photographer is no more a chemist or an experimenter, he can concentrate on his subject. This is the beginning of another era.

Compare dates: the first issue of Camera Work is published by Stieglitz in 1903. The first delivery of The North American Indian by Curtis, sold by subscription, in 1907.

Tirelessly, Curtis visited the 80 most authentic tribes. His friendship with some chiefs was facilitated by his application to use their own language, opening to him the path for the other communities.

When the publishing venture of The North American Indian ends in 1930 because of financial difficulties, Curtis had managed the most extraordinary and unsurpassed photographic documentary of all time: 2200 selected photographs distributed among twenty volumes of text and twenty portfolios.

The copy for sale by Christie's in New York on April 10 is complete. Kept in excellent condition, it is certainly the finest surviving example of this unusual work.

This lot is estimated $ 1M. Here is the link to the catalog.

POST SALE COMMENT

Its exceptional freshness enabled this highly important book to reach $ 2.9 million including premium.