Some notes from yesterday's Rare Books & Manuscript sale at PBA Galleries:
- The 1618 French edition of Petrus Betius' Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum Libri Septem, the 1602 Chaucer, the first edition of A Christmas Carol, and the Isaac Newton manuscript were among the ~55 items which failed to sell (of 169 lots).
- The first edition of Moby-Dick in a decorative Jack Papuchian decorative binding made $13,200 - below the estimate.
- Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (second edition, 1599-1600) fetched $9,600 (just off the high estimate).
- One of the many AA books in the sale (this a first edition, first printing with a facsimile dust jacket) sold for $10,800.
- A "first edition, first issue of the first book on the Chinese language to be published in Europe, and possibly the first book in English on China, with the rare map" (John Webb's An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language, 1669) was one of the sale's high spots; it sold for $18,000.
