January's a fairly quiet auction month overall, but there's certainly the potential for a really big sale price, at Christie's New York on 20 January.

• PBA Galleries sells Fine Books in All Fields on 5 January, in 460 lots. A first edition Leaves of Grass rates the top estimate, at $20,000-30,000.
• Edinburgh's Lyon & Turnbull will sell Rare Books, Maps, and Manuscripts on 11 January, in 456 lots.
• Bloomsbury hosts a Bibliophile sale on 12 January, in 398 lots.
• On 19 January, PBA Galleries sells Americana & Californiana, Cartography, and Clipper Ship Cards. No preview yet available.
  
• Christie's has just one book sale this month, on 20 January ... but it's a doozy: the Duke of Portland's copy of Audubon's Birds of America (est. $7-10 million). See Rebecca's preview of this sale from earlier this week.
• There will be at least a few books and manuscripts in the 22 January Bonhams sale.
• Swann Galleries holds a "Shelf Sale" on 26 January.

Coming up later this month at Christie's, the Duke of Portland's four-volume set of John James Audubon's Birds of America, the most expensive book ever sold at auction. Estimated at $7-10 million, bibliophiles will wait with bated breath to find out if the duke's Birds will break the current world record of $11.5 million, set at Sotheby's sale of Lord Hesketh's rare books and manuscripts in December of 2010. The duke's set is bound in full crimson wide gilt-panelled morocco (seen here at left) and is, according to Christie's, "in very fine condition, with colors fresh and bright, and showing minimal handling evidence."

Audubon was an itinerant artist who traversed the American wilderness of the early nineteenth century, drawing birds. His idea to create an oversized folio of more than four hundred hand-colored plates showing the birds in life-size was visionary; it was also prohibitively expensive. He relied on subscriptions to raise the necessary funds. His magnificently illustrated double-elephant folio was issued in parts in the years 1827-1838, initially printed by W.H. Lizars of Edinburgh, but soon transferred to Robert Havell & Son in London. 

New Year's Eve has passed, and with it, the opportunity to freely imbibe before the new resolutions set in. So instead, we can soberly contemplate the long history between American writers and drinking cocktails. The good folks at Flavorwire compiled a piece last year on ten classic authors and their favorite drinks. I'd like to expand on that list here at Fine Books with a few American authors who didn't make their cut:

Raymond Carver and the Bloody Mary

Carver was for many years a hard drinker and the story goes that the Bloody Mary was his favorite cocktail because he was hungover so often.

Raymond Chandler and the Gimlet

Chandler picked up a taste for gimlets while in London and almost single-handedly popularized the cocktail in America. In a famous scene in The Long Goodbye, Terry Lennox describes the perfect gimlet recipe as "half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else."

It's the new year, and perhaps, like Pepys, one of your resolutions is to begin a diary or a journal. I'm content to take a peek into the diaries of others, particularly when they are as beautiful as the ones in the new book, Beyond Words: 200 Years of Illustrated Diaries, published late last fall by Heyday Books in association with the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library.