Maine Antique Digest March 2015

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Maine Antique Digest, March 2015 5-C
- AUCTION -
The Grant Album, in Memoriam:
Mount MacGregor to Riverside
Park, Edition de Luxe sold for
$7500. Included was its rare cast-
iron spring-hinged display stand.
The album consists of 161 albumen
prints, each approximately 12" x
10", showing former U.S. President
Ulysses S. Grant’s family, career,
and funeral procession in Manhat-
tan. The album was published in
Boston by the U.S. Instantaneous
Photo Company in 1886. There
are other versions. Formerly in the
Forbes collection, this is one of the
largest.
An archive of a commercial art-
ist’s two extended tours of Mayan
ruins in 1940 sold for $8125 (est.
$1500/2500). She was Elizabeth
Turner Miller (1911-1985) of Bal-
timore. The lot includes four reels
of film from the trip and eight
scrapbooks of photographs. Also
included are Miller’s travel dia-
ries and more. Miller traveled to
Quiriguá, Guatemala; Copán in
western Honduras; Chichen Itza
in the Yucatán; and several other
places. Her companions included
photographer John Henry Coon,
who likely took the professional
photographs.
A copy of Libra Astronomica by Car-
los de Sigüenza y Góngora sold to a
dealer for $12,500 (est. $8000/12,000).
Published in Mexico in 1690, it is one
of the first scientific books written
by a native Latin American. Mexi-
can-born Sigüenza was professor of
mathematics at the Universidad de
Mexico. According to Swann, only
one other copy has come to auction
since 1981.
“The Only
Copy for Sale”
The price fetched by Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis may
have amazed its consignor, but it wasn’t a surprise to the trade and
others who follow the market. Material from the American Revo-
lution has a lot of firepower these days, comparable to the market
heat that, for example, natural history color-plate books were gen-
erating 20 years ago, when Mrs. Paul Mellon was bashing heads
with a few other collectors in the field.
Aside from the collecting fashions that come and go, there have
been more permanent, well-documented changes that the age of
the Internet has ushered in. In a clever phrase that may recall for
M.A.D. readers the “good, better, best” furniture comparisons of
Albert Sack, the longtime rare-book dealer William S. Reese has
observed that in order to make a sale in the current market, a seller
needs to proffer “the best, the cheapest, or the only copy” of the
book in question.
Hence, the title of one of the William Reese Company’s latest
catalogs is “The Only Copy for Sale.”
Reese told M.A.D. that he and his staff verified the “only” status
old, rare, and out-of-print books.” It’s the place that many dealers
consult in order to price books accurately. Reese said he has no
doubt that other copies will come to the fore as the catalog circu-
lates, but, as of its publication in late 2014, the 148 items featured
were verifiable “only’s,” a sampling of which follows.
 A good copy of the first edition of the first book by the first
poet of New England, Anne Bradstreet. “No perfect copy has
appeared at auction since 1949,” the catalog states of The Tenth
Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, published in London in 1650.
$20,000.
 Thomas W. Streeter’s first edition of John Trumbull’s The
Adventures of Daniel Boon [sic].One of only four copies total that
the William Reese Company has been able to locate, it was printed
by Trumbull in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1786. The text is said to
have been dictated by Boone. The same copy sold at auction in
1888 for $8.50. As Streeter (1883-1965) often said, “Those were
the days to buy rare Americana.” $150,000.
 A first edition of Samuel de Champlain’s Voyages et
Descouvertures Faites en La Nouvelle France has the first reports
of his explorations of New France in 1615-18. Published in Paris in
1619 with four full-page plates plus two folding plates, it describes
Champlain’s experiences with the Iroquois, the Hurons, and other
native American tribes of the St. Lawrence Valley. $85,000.
 The first American road atlas, Christopher Colles’s A Survey
of the Roads of the United States of America was published in New
York in 1789, the year George Washington took office as our first
president. This 83-page work features 17 engraved, very accurate
maps created by Colles through the use of a perambulator. His own
invention, it measured mileage by adding up the revolutions of a
wheel trailed behind a carriage. $28,000.
 A first edition of Robert Harcourt’s A Relation of a Voyage
to Guiana was published in London in 1613. A narrative of the
attempt by the British to establish a colony in South America
during the time of Jamestown, it was Americana collector Frank
C. Deering’s copy. Only collector Boies Penrose’s former copy has
appeared for sale in recent times. $30,000.
 A copy of the first true printing of Frederick Jackson Turner’s
The Significance of the Frontier in American History, published
in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1894. (An offprint was issued by the
Wisconsin Historical Society later in the same year.) As expressed
in this essay, Turner’s epoch-making idea was that the openness
of the American frontier shaped American character and that its
closing would have an equal impact on the national identity. As
Reese notes in his catalog, “To this cataloguer’s mind the impact
of Turner’s thesis on the field of American history was not unlike
that of Einstein’s theory of relativity on the field of physics—all
subsequent historians would have to deal with” its implications.
$12,500.
For more information, contact William Reese Company at (203)
789-8081 or see the Web site ).
A first edition of The Book of Mormon sold
for $62,500. It was published in Palmyra,
New York, just days before the official estab-
lishment of the church on April 6, 1830.
An interesting piece of American Judaica, Dis-
course on the Restoration of the Jews by Noah
Mordecai sold for $13,750 (est. $2000/3000) to
a collector bidding in the room. Published in
New York in 1845, it consists of an address given
at the New York Tabernacle to an audience of
both Christians and Jews on the subject of the
nascent Zionist movement. The speech was
bound with other pamphlets, and a folding map
of Israel was intact.
Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie, a 16" x 10¾" letter-
press broadside with a woodcut illustration, sold
for $4000 (est. $500/750). The text is the lyrics to
a song about the battle. Published circa 1813, it
is extremely rare, with no other copies traced by
Swann. This copy came from the Milton R. Slater
collection.