Swann will sell Printed and Manuscript Americana on 17 September. Some of the lots are duplicates from the John Carter Brown Library, being sold to fund new acquisitions.
Among the lots are a rather extensive selection of American Revolution books and documents, Early American Imprints, and Latin Americana; a first octavo edition of McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1848-50), estimated at $10,000-15,000; a fragment of a 1709 English-Massachusett psalter with early ownership notations ($800-$1,200); a number of American Bibles from the library of Mel and Julie Meadows, including one of just a few dozen copies of the 1781 Aitken Bible, the first complete Bible in English printed in America; $40,000-60,000); the very rare c. 1682 edition of the Bay Psalm Book (also $40,000-60,000); John Cotton's The Bloudy Tenent ... of 1647 ($1,000-1,500); an extensive archive of Howard Hughes plane-crash related material ($40,000-60,000).
I have to say some of the JCB deaccessions are a little surprising: I would not have expected them to be selling a copy of Exquemelin's History of the Bucaniers (1684) with John Carter Brown's stamp ($500-750), or the 1653 Cambridge Platform with his bookplate ($3,000-4,000), or Hernando Cortes' 1524 Praeclara ... de Nova Maris Oceani Hyspania Narratio with Brown's inked stamp and bookplate ($2,000-3,000), or what Sabin called "a volume of extreme rarity," the 1574 Mexican imprint of Lagunas' Arte y Dictionario ($2,000-3,000), of which just four library copies were located by Swann.
