Books & Manuscripts, Part 2, Goes Up For Bid on March 5 at Turner Auctions + Appraisals

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA, February 16, 2022 – Turner Auctions + Appraisals is pleased to present Books & Manuscripts, Part 2, on March 5, 2022. The sale features over 205 lots of antique or vintage books, including some first editions; documents; maps; engravings, lithographs, postcard albums, signed lots, and more. Most are from the collection and estate of Holbrook T. Mitchell of Northern California.

Lot 2, Book from the Library of Mark Twain, Signed 1906. Estimate $1,000-$2,000

Printed in English, Latin and various European languages, the books date from the 14th-20th centuries. They cover a wide range of themes, including history, travel, the classics, poems and poetry, books and literature, California and Americana, aviation, churches and castles, England and Europe, wars, legends and folklore, cowboy life, Native Americans, Champagne, music, and stories for children and youths. Among the first or very early editions are works of Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Ayn Rand, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, Ellery Queen, and Tom Swift novels. There are also books from the libraries of Mark Twain and Marie Louise, the second wife of Napoleon. Other noted authors include Horace; Seneca; Giovanni Boccaccio; Robert Louis Stevenson; Edith Van Dyne, the pseudonym for L. Frank Baum and Emma Speed Samson; and Herb Caen.

The documents include a French patent of nobility with a gilt-painted armorial miniature, English indentures, a 1704 French letter, an early printed book leaf, a Civil War pay voucher, and four illuminated Tafsir al-Qur'an manuscript leaves in Arabic and Persian. There are also a number of lots – books, letters, photographs, or legal documents – with signatures of the famous, including Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, Herbert Hoover, Luther Burbank, Alexandre Hamilton Jr., Barbara Stanwyck, Ronald Coleman, and Marie Joseph Louise de Savoie. A selection of postcard albums, mostly French, date from the early 1900s. Completing the sale are engravings by Giorgio Mantovano Ghisi and Antoine-Ignace Melling, three lots from the Planisphaerium Ptolemaicum series, Bernard Buffet lithographs, Indian miniatures, and a Walt Disney print secretarial signed.

Turner Auctions + Appraisals begins its online auction on Saturday, March 5, 2022, at 10:30 am PST; sale items are available for preview and bidding now. The auction will be featured live on Bidsquare.