Christie’s Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts including Americana will take place online from 14 to 28 January in New York. This curated sale will span over 500 years of the history of the book. It features two important private collections: Incunabula from the Collection of Eugene S. Flamm and Highlights from the Owen Gingerich Astronomical Library, as well as high points of modern literature, rare maps, printed and manuscript Americana, and more.

Incunabula from the Collection of Eugene S. Flamm reflects, in Dr Flamm’s own words, ‘the book as an object of admiration and as an instrument of learning’, including early printed examples of encyclopedias, bibliographies, histories, medical illustration, scientific works, and more. Among the top lots are a beautifully illuminated copy of the first Italian edition of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis; Albertus Magnus’s Philosophia pauperum, featuring the first printed illustration of cerebral ventricles; and the first and only edition of Ludovicus’s early contribution to neuroscience Trilogium animae, with a woodcut of the brain by Albrecht Dürer.

Highlights from the Owen Gingerich Astronomical Library trace the exciting developments of the Scientific Revolution through first and early editions of important works by Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and many others. They include Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum, his first substantial work, and Astronomia nova, his masterpiece; John Flamsteed’s own copy of the unauthorised star catalogue published by Halley and Newton; an annotated copy of the second edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium; and the first complete English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometrie.

Other highlights in the sale include a first edition, one of only 100 signed, of James Joyce’s Ulysses; an inscribed first edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita inscribed with a butterfly; an inscribed copy of Martin Luther King Jr’s Where Do We Go From Here; the first edition in English of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s A Treatise on the Social Compact; portions of a Godfather script from Marlon Brando, with his edits; and more. Historical highlights include letters written to Revolutionary War dragoon officer Anthony Walton White by Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, Horatio Gates, and Banastre Tarleton; and the first book printing of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The auction will open for bidding on 14 January. Lots will begin to close on 28 January at 10am EST. Works will be on view during Bibliography Week from 20 to 27 January at our Rockefeller Center galleries.