Current Events & Trends | August 30, 2021 | Jeremy Dibbell

Rare Books &c. at Auction This Week

Courtesy of PBA Galleries

An inscribed first edition of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, offered at PBA Galleries this week.

At Bonhams New York on Tuesday, August 31, Photographs: Summer Edition, in 158 lots. Three lots share an estimate of $10,000–15,000: a print of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico; Adams' Dawn, Autumn Forest, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee (1948); and 24 collotype prints from Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion (1884–1887).

Courtesy of PBA Galleries

On Thursday, September 2, PBA Platinum: Rare Books, Manuscripts & Art at PBA Galleries, in 71 lots. A first edition of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (dated 1881 but published December 1880) in a Russian binding of the period shares the top estimate of $30,000–50,000 with Volume III of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Zoology (1859). This volume contains the original Darwin and Wallace statement on natural selection. At $20,000–30,000 are a copy of the first edition of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1910–1913); the 1513 Aldine second part of Plato's works; and the first printing in any language of the I-Ching, published in Latin in 1834 and 1839.

An inscribed presentation copy of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939) signed by the author to author and reporter Vincent Sheean could sell for $15,000–25,000. Other lots include a first edition of Johnson's Dictionary (1755), estimated at $8,000–12,000 and a first edition of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), at $5,000–8,000.