Bibles, Library Dupes, and Cookbook Lead Americana Sale

Swann Galleries, New York City

by Jeanne Schinto

Photos courtesy Swann

Of the top 20 lots at Swann Galleries' sale of printed and manuscript Americana on September 17, half were from a consignment of duplicates deaccessioned by the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Six of the ten were extremely rare examples of early Latin Americana. Two others in different categories broke auction price records, according to Swann's research.

"Often, as I'm sure you know, ex-library copies are not as desirable," department director Rick Stattler said, "but in this case, it's such a distinguished library, and there are so few library markings on most of them, I think if anything the John Carter Brown provenance might have actually helped some of the books."

All were sold by order of the library's board of governors with proceeds going to fund new acquisitions.

One of the record breakers, going to a dealer at $13,200 (including buyer's premium), was an English edition of Joyfull Newes out of the New-Found Worlde. Published in London in 1596, the herbal by Spanish physician Nicholas Monardes includes one of the world's first illustrations of the tobacco plant, accompanied by a long article about it. There are also images of other curative plants never seen before by Europe. "This was a third edition, but it was in a gorgeous binding that definitely helped the price," said Stattler.

An 18th-century culinary work from the Brown collection brought another record price. How could it not? The last time a copy of Thomas Chapman's The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, And Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director went on the block, at the American Art Association in New York City in 1917, it sold for $7. This time, the price was $26,400 on an estimate of $500/750 that surely did not take into consideration the cultural world's continuing fervent interest in gastronomy. It is the number two listing in Eleanor Lowenstein's Bibliography of American Cookery Books 1742-1860, published by the American Antiquarian Society in 1972. Only The Compleat Housewife precedes it.

A Swann press release described the bidding action this way: "After a few preliminary bids, a phone bidder directed the Swann representative to call out $5000, then $10,000 and $20,000 to speed matters along, before finally giving up the chase." The winner was a dealer in the room. Not only a record for that title, the price is believed to be the highest paid at auction for any early American cookery book, smashing the $9775 record set at Swann on February 10, 2005, for a 1792 copy of The Frugal Housewife.

Of the sale's 406 lots, 171 of them related to South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Besides the Brown deaccessions, they included books from the estate of Maury A. Bromsen (1919-2005), a historian and antiquarian book dealer whose specialty was colonial Spanish America from the time of Columbus to the death of Simón Bolívar (1783-1830).

"It's an interesting market," Stattler said of Latin Americana in general. "We've been able to develop it over the last couple of years, although Swann has been selling a lot of Latin American books since at least 1978. That's when we had a very major sale here, the collection of Alberto Parreño. There are collectors and dealers in the United States who are very interested in this material, but we've also got a market in Central and South America as well."

Bibles were another factor in the success of this sale, which achieved a gross of $658,986 (est. $375,980/557,370) and an impressive sell-through rate of 88%. A so-called Aitken Bible, produced by Robert Aitken in Philadelphia in 1782, sold to a collector for $43,200. Bibles in Cherokee, Choctaw, and Dakota fetched $960, $780, and $1080, respectively. The first translation from Greek and Hebrew into English of the entire Bible by a woman, Connecticut suffragist Julia Evelina Smith, realized $3360. According to the catalog, no copies of Smith's work had been seen at auction since 1988.

The sale also featured a copy of the Bay Psalm Book. Selling to a collector for $57,600, it established a new auction price record for this edition, according to Swann. It was also the top lot of the day. Usually the date for the edition is given as 1682, since two of the other known copies were bound with Bibles from that date. This one, however, may be earlier. Bound with an Edinburgh Bible, it bears the imprint of Hezekiah Usher of Boston, and no other works with the same imprint are known past 1669, Swann's catalog states.

The Bay Psalm Book and the Bibles came from collectors Mel and Julie Meadows of Spotsylvania, Virginia. According to a story in the Washington Post, the couple is selling because they're in financial straits, dealing with soured real-estate investments, college tuition, and medical expenses all at once. A much larger section of European Bibles from the Meadows consignment was sold by Swann on October 20 (see sidebar). All told, the Meadows collection is one of the largest offerings of Bibles to come up for auction in recent years.

A Howard Hughes archive estimated at $40,000/60,000 did not find a buyer. It consisted of materials kept by William Durkin (1916-2006) relating to his 1946 rescue of Hughes from the burning wreckage of the XF-11 that crashed in Beverly Hills. Hughes credited Durkin with saving his life, and the two became friends.

One memorable gift from Hughes to Durkin, included in this lot, was the control yoke from the downed plane—its steering wheel, essentially. There were also letters and other materials relating to Durkin's Marine career and involvement with Hughes, dating from 1943 to 1957.

"We're still working on a post-sale on that," Stattler said a week after the auction. "So we're not sure yet what's going to happen. It looks like the estimate was too high. It's hard to know what the market is for something that unique, and the Howard Hughes buffs are certainly a very specialized market."

Institutions made several important purchases. Georgetown University paid $3120 for a group of letters to career diplomat Joseph Grew (1880-1965), Roosevelt's ambassador to Japan. Columbia University bought another of the sale's unique offerings, paying $10,800 for the archive of the Riker family law firm of New York City. Consisting of many thousands of documents, the material dates from 1804 to 1924, with the bulk of it from 1850 to 1911. The firm, whose founder Richard Riker was admitted to the bar in 1795, specialized in estate and property law. The trove is unprocessed and tantalizing.

As the catalog states, the law practice, extending over three generations, handled cases on Long Island and in upstate New York, but the heart of it was in Manhattan during a period of tremendous growth. The firm, which continued as De Grove & Riker, worked not only among the city's established old Dutch and English elite, but also among the rising German, Jewish, and Irish immigrants. The documents include invoices, wills, maps, deeds, estate inventories, and correspondence that seem destined to shed new light on the city's history and many of its important personages. The name of William M. "Boss" Tweed has already been discovered in papers from a case dated 1875.

The archive did not come directly to the auction from the family. It was purchased in the 1990's from the last location of De Grove & Riker in Manhattan. "It had apparently been in the same building where their offices were," said Stattler. "De Grove and Riker wrapped up in 1911, so it had been there for almost a century."

One other legal-themed item in the sale is worthy of note. It is a one-page manuscript relating to the attorney for one John Quelch. Quelch had a brief career as a pirate, looting nine Portuguese ships before being hanged in Boston in 1704. The document, which sold for $4560 (est. $1000/1500), was written in the hand of James Meinzies, defense lawyer for Quelch and his 21-member crew, some of whom were hanged with him. It was a petition from Meinzies, asking for payment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony's Governor Joseph Dudley. Swann's catalog states, "Meinzies was later paid £20 out of [Quelch's] confiscated gold for his troubles."

For more information, contact Swann at (212) 254-4710 or via the Web site (www.swanngalleries.com).

The Meadowses' Other Bibles

It's nice to know that a typo can come to some good. That's the case with the so-called Vinegar Bible, a copy of which sold at Swann's Bibles and early printed books sale on October 20 for a mid-estimate $4320. Published by John Baskett in Oxford, England in 1717, it has a misprint, "vinegar" for "vineyard," among other errors.

The consignment of 55 lots of English and European Bibles along with related materials from the Mel and Julie Meadows collection included a copy of another volume with a famous mistake. It's in what the catalog called the "pedocide Bible," whose Mark 7:27 reads, "Let the children first be killed" instead of "filled." Published in London in 1795 by Thomas Bensley for R. Bowyer & J. Fittler, the first edition brought $540 (est. $400/600).

There was also a "Great She Bible," published in London by Robert Barker in 1613, that sold for $13,200 (est. $10,000/15,000). The appellation stems from a corrected mistake. In the Book of Ruth in the first edition of the King James Bible, published in 1611, the line reads, "and he went into the city" instead of "and she went into the city." A Bible with the typo intact is known as the "Great He Bible."

A Tyndale Bible, published by London's Richard Jugge in 1552, brought $33,600 (est. $15,000/25,000), making it the top lot of the 403-lot sale.

William Tyndale was the first person to translate the New Testament into the English language, working from Greek and Latin texts, and the first to print it, in 1525-26. The one whose biblical phrases we know so well today (e.g., "my brother's keeper," "salt of the earth," "filthy lucre") also introduced into the language such new words as "scapegoat." Tyndale strikes the contemporary mind as an ecclesiastical Shakespeare, but in his day, he was a criminal because England, unlike almost every other country, forbade translating the word of God into the vernacular.

The full story of this 127-year ban is told in Let It Go among Our People: An Illustrated History of the English Bible from John Wyclif to the King James Version by David Price and Charles Caldwell Ryrie, published in 2004. "Overcoming the political and ecclesiastical resistance to an English Bible was not an easy task," the authors write. "Lives were lost along the way-not only for producing English Bibles, but also for merely owning or reading them." In 1536, before Tyndale could complete his translation of the Old Testament, he was executed.

A copy of a Greek edition from which Tyndale worked was in the sale. A first edition of the New Testament, with Latin translation by Erasmus, it was published in Basel, Switzerland in 1516 and sold for $22,800 (est. $10,000/15,000).

The "Matthew" Bible, first published in London in 1537 as the work of a Thomas Matthew, was actually Tyndale's, as completed by Myles (or Miles) Coverdale. By then, the new Church of England was established, a turnaround about Tyndale had occurred, and to save embarrassment and overt excuse-making over the past, the pseudonym was used. All English translations of the Bible thereafter have been essentially revisions of the Tyndale-Coverdale work. A copy of it, published in 1551, sold at Swann for $10,200 (est. $8000/12,000).

The Meadowses also owned one of the first Baskerville Bibles, published for the University of Cambridge in 1763 by John Baskerville. He's the man who gave us the Baskerville typeface, which is still widely used today. Considered the printing masterpiece of this confirmed atheist, the Baskerville sold for $4560 (est. $1500/2500).

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