Antique Map And Print Events For November, 2005

If you'd like to see our listing of events, including exhibitions, for the month of November, 2005, you can check our archives. Starting next month, around December 1st, we'll begin posting this calendar on a monthly basis, making it easier to access through the blog archives. If you would like to post information concerning an event that is related to antique maps or antique prints, you are welcome to do so. Just use the "comment" button at the bottom of this posting.

Antique Maps Auction Preview For Week Of October 31, 2005

November 3 is the date for PBA Galleries’s Fine Books & Manuscripts Sale. I can attest that PBA is a great auction to bid at – I won an item last week, on an absentee bid, and they actually called me after the auction to advise me of a couple of additional condition notes about the antique map I had purchased. They even offered me the opportunity to decline the item if desired. That’s great customer service, and PBA Galleries should be complimented.

Audubon Quadrupeds Prints And Pheasant Prints

Lot 3 is a 3-volume, octavo set of Audubon's Quadrupeds of North America, published by V. G. Audubon between 1849 and 1854. Condition is said to be extremely good, and the estimated hammer price is $7,000-10,000. That seems high, but we’ll see next week.

A nice set of pheasant plates follows right behind the quads. Lot 4 is A Monograph of the Pheasants, by Charles Beebe, 1918, and has a presale estimate of $3,000-5,000. There are 90 color plates in this limited edition folio.

Cook’s Voyages, And Rare African Geography With Maps

“Stunning” is the word PBA uses to describe lot 36: a six-volume set of Cook’s Voyages, and the first Hogg edition. (London, 1785). The presale estimate of $2000-3,000 looks like it will be surpassed, if the set is as nice as it sounds.

Lot 89 is A Geographical Historie of Africa, by John Leo, published in London in 1600 by George Bishop. It is the first English edition, with an extra folding plate and an extra folding map by Overton. Condition is described as extremely good, and the presale is set at $5,000-8,000.

Fine Botanical Prints On Display

James Sowerby’s English Botany shows up as lot 136, a ten-volume run containing 711 of 720 plates. The bindings are in poor shape on at least half the volumes, but the plates are described as fine in most cases. Presale estimate is $2,000-3,000.

The best-in-show in the botanical prints department, and a jewel of the auction, is a rare volume of hand-colored Redoute prints. Description des plantes nouvelles…dans le jardin de J. M. Cels, by E. P. Ventenat, (Paris, 1800) contains 100 hand-colored engravings, mostly after drawings by Pierre-Joseph Redoute. A folio, large paper copy, in fine condition. Lot 138, it is estimated at $25,000-35,000.

Antique Map Auction Preview For Week Of October 24, 2005

The action is in Boston this week, as some very nice antique maps of Boston and New England go on the block at Skinner, Inc. October 30 is the date for Skinner’s Fine Books and Manuscripts Sale, held at the same time as the Boston Book Fair.

Audubon Prints

The jewel of the sale is undoubtedly lot 189, a fine copy of Adubon’s Birds of North America, 1860 Bien edition, said to be in superb condition. The presale estimate is $300,000-400,000. That’s a lot of money for chromolithograph. If it’s more than your wallet can stand, there are some loose prints from the first edition also in this auction. Most of them are framed.

Cook's Voyages

Lot 215 is the atlas volume from Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784). Lacking the “Death of Cook” plate, it still commands a presale estimate of $6,000-8,000.

City Views Of Newport, Rhode Island

An unusual item is lot 313, The City and Scenery of Newport, Rhode Island, by John Collins. Published in 1857, it is an oblong folio with fourteen views by Collins, lithographed by T. Sinclair. Skinner is hoping to realize at least $2,500-3,500 for this rarity.

Buffon Bird Prints

A set of Georges Buffon’s monumental, 9-volume Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux, (1770-1783) shows up as lot 320. Estimate $3,000-5,000.

Antique Maps of North America And New England

On the antique map front, bidders will compete for such items as lot 414, Arrowsmith’s A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America (1833 or later), a folding map mounted on linen, with an estimate of $800-1200. Lot 416 is an unusual piece, described as a "large and skilled manuscript map," The United States of America by C. Stark, Jr., Dow Academy AD 1819. This framed piece, even with discolored varnish, has a presale estimate of $1,500-2,000. Finally, if Revolutionary-era New England, especially Boston, is your interest, then this auction has some items you’ll want to check out. Some of the plans of Boston are extremely rare.

Auction Preview for Antique Maps & Prints, week of Oct 17

Bloomsbury Auctions has plenty of action this Thursday, Oct 20, if Travel and Natural History is your thing. Interesting lots include an 1826 pair of folding maps, of North and South America, by Adrien Brue; a 1740 history of Jamaica with 2 folding maps; S. A. Mitchell's 1837 folding map of Illinois; and a 1792 second edition of Jedediah Morse's American Geography. Good pickings for collectors of folding maps.

Western & Texas Americana

Not to be outdone, PBA Galleries of San Francisco is also in action on Thursday, selling off the Americana library of Ford Mitchell, with plenty of artifacts from both sides of the Mississippi, but especially from Texas. A copy of Emory's Military Reconnoissance is up for grabs, as is his Map of Texas; also George Wheeler's 1883 topographical map of Yosemite, amid a wide-ranging collection of books, manuscripts, autograph material and related items. The sale includes manuscripts by George Washington, John Adams, Samuel Houston, Stephen F. Austin and many others, as well as books central to the history of Texas and the United States.

Stolen Antique Maps -- What's The Solution?

A story by William Finnegan in this week's New Yorker magazine tells of the arrest this summer of E. Forbes Smiley III, one of the world's leading rare map dealers. Smiley has been charged by New Haven, CT authorities with the theft of 3 maps cut from rare books at Yale University's Beinecke Library in June of this year. He also faces possible federal charges in connection with the theft of a fourth, more valuable map, allegedly found on his person on the day of his arrest.

Should All The Rare Maps, Books, And Documents Be Locked Away?

At the heart of this case is a simple question -- how much access, if any, should a library permit, to books or documents that are rare and undoubtedly valuable? If Smiley is guilty he would only be the latest in a string of well-known "slicers," or thieves, who have cut antique maps and other valuable pages out of rare books in libraries. These thefts continue because stealing pages from books is easy pickings. If it remains easy, with stupendously valuable prizes like the $150,000 Gerard de Jode map that Smiley is accused of taking, then he will hardly be the last of the antique map thieves. But, to make these artifacts more secure, libraries would need to sharply curtail access to them. Is that the right thing to do?

Calendar: Antique maps and antique prints events in October and November

Sept 25 - Mar 26. National Gallery of Art. Exhibition: Audubon's Dream Realized: Selections from "The Birds of America". Includes 47 prints from the double elephant folio edition.

Oct 20 Chicago Map Society. Meeting at the Newberry Library at 7:30 pm. W. Raymond Wood (University of Missouri) will discuss Across the Wide Mississippi: Maps of the Indian Country Before Lewis and Clark.

Oct 20 Washington Map Society. Meeting at 7:00 pm in Geography & Map Division of Library of Congress. Capt A. E. "Skip" Theberge (NOAA, ret, Technical Information Specialist - NOAA Library) will discuss Mapping the Civil War - U. S. Coast Survey.

Oct 26 Tryon Fine Arts Center, Tryon, North Carolina. Lecture: Making Sense of Historical Prints, Michael McCue. 1:15 pm.

Nov 9 At the New York Public Libary. Map Division Chief Alice Hudson presents an illustrated lecture Treasured Maps: Celebrating The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division at 6:00 pm. An exhibition of the same name is running at the Library until April 9, 2006.

Nov 10 Chicago Map Society. Meeting at the Newberry Library at 5:30 pm. Ralph Ehrenberg will discuss Mapping the West with Lewis and Clark.

Nov 17 Washington Map Society. A field trip to the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington DC. Meet in Explorers Hall at 7:00 pm. Program includes a tour of the facility followed by a brief review of the life and work of the late Dr. John Garver, Jr., former Chief Cartographer, NGS (by Bob Rhodes) and the introduction of the new NGS publication Mapping the World: an illustrated History of Cartography, by Ralph Ehrenberg (introduction by Allen Carroll).

Nov 18 - June 4 Springfield Museums. Exhibition: Currier and Ives, An American Panorama.
Features approximately 175 prints, from the former collection of Lenore and Sid Alpert.

Antarctica Exhibit Begins Today at Ohio State University

An Antarctic exhibit begins today at Hopkins Hall at Ohio State, and runs through October 29. Historical pastel drawings of the polar region by David Abbey Paige will be part of the exhibit. Paige accompanied Richard Byrd on his second polar expedition of 1933-35. Old film footage of the expedition is also being shown. National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams) will be at the Hughes Hall auditorium on October 26. For full details, and to confirm these times, check out the article in The Lantern, the OSU student newspaper.

New York Public Library Map Fair Cancelled

The NYPL map fair, originally slated for March, 2006, has been cancelled due to scheduling problems. Map division chief Alice Hudson indicates that the fair may be reconsidered for 2007. Check out the map division site here: http://nypl.org/research/chss/map/map.html

The library's 2 day map symposium, March 23-24, remains on schedule. Watch the First Printing Blog for details. or check out John W. Docktor's Cartography Calendar.

Neil Street, VintageMaps.com

Welcome to “First Printing” – the antique maps and prints blog for everyone.

With this inaugural posting, VintageMaps.com is pleased to launch its public blog, which we hope will be of interest and value to the antique maps and antique prints community. Blogging, as a tool, has already indelibly changed the nature of the internet. Blogging takes a fairly static medium, a webpage, and makes it dynamic. It allows for a public discussion, and posting of comments or announcements, in real time. It changes a webpage from a simply “a page” and makes it an interactive forum. With the addition of RSS technology, that forum can be “delivered,” instantaneously, to whoever wishes to subscribe. Most importantly, it allows everyone with something to say, to say it.

So please do. Say it, that is. Use the blog in any way that interests you or is of value to you – but please check the usage guidelines at the blog before your first post! The rules are few, but we won’t allow anything offensive, or purely commercial, in nature. We hope that societies and groups will use the blog to announce events or notices; dealers can look for items; collectors can ask questions; beginning collectors can find help. The range of topics is unlimited, as long as it relates to a field we all love, antique maps and prints.

Neil Street, Owner, VintageMaps.com