Friday, February 20, 2009

Auction Report: Highlights and Upcoming

- Through today (sorry, I dropped the ball on this one) Sotheby's is exhibiting for private sale the Valmadonna Trust collection, described as the "finest private library of Hebrew books and manuscripts in the world. ... Now for the first time, the entire library of the Valmadonna Trust - some 13,000 printed books and manuscripts - will be on public exhibition, including the incomparable 12th-century manuscript Pentateuch, the earliest dated Hebrew codex written in England, as well as Daniel Bomberg's magnificent edition of the Babylonian Talmud, one of the great printed books of the Western World." News article from Bloomsbury on the collection.

- Swann will hold a sale of Printed & Manuscript African Americana on 26 February. Highlights include a first edition of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on various subjects (1773) which seems to have been at one point in the collections of the Library of Congress - $20,000-30,000.

- The Isaac Newton manuscripts up at Bonhams on 15 February appear not to have sold.

- Bargains abounded at the Bloomsbury Bibliophile sale on 12 February.