An incredible collection of pen-and-ink illustrations for the 1906 edition of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds goes to auction tomorrow in Beverly Hills. Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose imagination was spurred after reading a French edition of the science fiction classic, produced some sketches of tripod aliens and death rays and brought them to Wells in London. Wells was so pleased with them (and so dissatisfied by the earlier illustrations commissioned for the 1898 first book form), he asked Corrêa to illustrate a 500-copy, limited edition published by L'Vandamme in Brussels.

Thirty illustrations, plus a promotional poster and a postcard from Wells to Corrêa, were consigned to Heritage Auctions by collector Stefan Gefter. Here are a few highlights:

Lot 71264: The illustration for the title page of Book I: The Coming of the Martians, 1906. Estimate: $20,000-25,000.

Lot 71268: The illustration "Martian Emerges," from Book I: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter IV: "The Cylinder Opens," 1906. Estimate $8,000-12,000.

Lot 71284: The illustration "Frightened Human," from Book II: The Earth Under the Martians, Chapter III: "The Days of Imprisonment," 1906. Estimate: $4,000-6,000.

Lot 71289: The illustration "Martin Viewing Drunken Crowd," from Book II: The Earth Under the Martians, Chapter VII: "The Man on Putney Hill," 1906. Estimate $8,000-12,000.

Images via Heritage Auctions.

Heading to Israel in the next week? Swing by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to see the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments, dating to somewhere between 30 and 1 BC.  

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, located in Washington, D.C., opened today an exhibit of Vanessa Bell's book design. Bell, a member of the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, designed graphic dust jackets and illustrations for the Hogarth Press, a publishing house co-founded by her sister, novelist Virginia Woolf. Enjoy here a sampling of exhibit's highlights:

Vanessa Bell, cover design for Virginia Woolf's Monday or Tuesday, The Hogarth Press, 1921; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center.

Vanessa Bell, jacket design for Virginia Woolf's The Waves, The Hogarth Press, 1931; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center.

Vanessa Bell, jacket design for Virginia Woolf's The Years, The Hogarth Press, 1937; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center.

Vanessa Bell, jacket design for Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, The Hogarth Press, 1938; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center.

Vanessa Bell, jacket design for Virginia Woolf's A Haunted House and other stories, The Hogarth Press, 1943; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center.

Music, a lecture and an Italian dinner in honor of Robert Browning's 203rd birthday were the order of events on Thursday at Baylor University's Armstrong Browning Library. An annual celebration, the birthday festivities are held in the grand three-story Italian Renaissance-style building built by the Browning collection founder, Dr. A.J. Armstrong. Filled with sixty-two stained glass windows, marble columns, black walnut marquetry paneling, and intricate ceiling designs, the Armstrong Library is routinely cited by various tastemakers as one of America's most beautiful libraries, and attracts over 25,000 visitors a year. 


Elizabeth and Robert Browning, public domain (Wikimedia)

Rita Patteson, director of the Armstrong Library, spoke with me ahead of the celebration.  "Browning Day is the biggest event of the year for us," she said. "It's our chance to share the beauty of Browning's poetry with the world, and to showcase our collection."  The library is the repository of the largest collection of correspondence and other material written by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, two of the 19th century's preeminent poets and prolific letter-writers.

 
ABL McLean Foyer of Meditation, Ryan Duncan, Baylor Marketing and Communications

Events started at 3:30 p.m in the Hankamer Treasure Room with the premiere of "Mysterion," a composition created by the Armstrong Library's Artist-in-Residence Carlos Colón.  Baylor professor Joshua King followed up with a lecture entitled "Reforming Christ's Body in Aurora Leigh," discussing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1856 masterpiece, a nine-book novel composed in blank verse that assured her position as one of the foremost poets of the Victorian era.


ABL Treasure Room, credit Matthew Minard, Baylor Marketing and Communications

After a light reception and time to visit the collection, members of the Fano Club convened their annual dinner, also held in the library. Browning scholar William Lyon Phelps founded the Fano Club in 1912, naming it for the Italian seaside town nestled on the Adriatic Sea where the painting "The Guardian Angel," by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591 -1666) had inspired Robert Browning to compose "The Guardian Angel: A Picture at Fano" (1848). Initiation requirements include traveling to Fano, Italy and, once viewing the painting, mailing a postcard to the library stating that the aforementioned tasks were complete.  (Seeing "The Guardian Angel" is not as easy as it sounds; Fano is a three-hour drive from Florence, and, in typical Italian fashion, the Civic Museum (where the painting now hangs) is closed Mondays, for a few hours most afternoons, and all Italian holidays.) There are approximately 200 current Fano Club members, of whom nearly 40 traveled to Waco to enjoy the annual dinner. This year, the meal was served family-style and featured a traditional meal of antipasto, chicken saltimbocca and tiramisu for dessert.  Patteson, who is also a Fano Club member, was looking forward to the dinner. "We catch up, read some poetry, and enjoy a wonderful meal, all in the name of Robert Browning." La dolce vita, indeed.

  
ABL Pied Piper of Hamelin Window, Haskins Studio, Rochester, New York, 1924, credit Matthew Minard, Baylor Marketing and Communications

Click here for more information about Armstrong Browning Library.

Would you like Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, to send you a handwritten postcard? How about 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr, or acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee?

Here's your chance. The Common is holding its second annual postcard auction to raise funds for its biannual, Amherst-based literary journal. If you win, you or a friend of your choosing will receive a personalized postcard -- from this list of authors. Online bidders can bid now through May 13 at midnight; in-person bidding concludes on the night of the literary celebration, The Common in the City: Mumbai on May 14.

The bids opened at $35, and some have already jumped into the hundreds. Good luck!

Articles written by Mark Twain when he was a 29-year-old reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, have been uncovered by scholars at the University of California, Berkeley. Twain was stationed for a year in San Francisco where his job was to write a daily 2,000-word "letter" about San Franciscan life to the readers of the Territorial Enterprise. His colorful and amusing anecdotes - already illustrative of his later hallmarked style - offer an intriguing insight into a young man at a crossroads. Twain, in 1865, was nearing his 30th birthday and still unsure of what he wanted to do with his life.

Since early 2011, uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East have brought down old regimes, and in the wake of bloodshed and chaos, looters and profiteers have descended onto ancient sites and plundered antiquities and rare books for profit, representing an irreparable loss of our global cultural heritage. The looters' meticulous organization is astonishing - satellite images detail the scale of the destruction, and timestamped images indicate how quickly these treasures are disappearing. ISIS maintains a sophisticated network of in-house archaeologists and arts experts who identify and document artifacts, because looting is a tremendous business that shows no signs of abating. Where's all this loot going? To American and European auction houses, or right into the hands of wealthy collectors throughout the world.

Tonight, the HBO newsmagazine VICE is airing an episode dedicated to the robust trade of black-market antiquities flourishing in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.  In "Egyptian Tomb Raiders," reporter Gianna Toboni visits world heritage sites such as the tombs at Luxor and Abu Sir Al-Malaq. There, a group of professional looters takes her to a site currently under illicit excavation. The camera pans the surroundings - huge holes hastily dug into the dirt, littered with piles of unwrapped mummified skulls and bones, remains ransacked for jewelry buried thousands of years ago. Large tire tracks in the sand indicate the presence of trucks and bulldozers that paved the way for this wholesale desecration.


Photo credit: Courtesy of HBO

Toboni even gets a local boss to detail the export process. Holding a small stone carving of a queen, she asks how much a dealer in Cairo would pay for that one piece. Without hesitating, he estimates it could fetch $33,000 to $37,000, of which he would net around nine thousand dollars, while his pit crew would earn about $4,000. He adds that he does not know the ultimate price an American would pay.  Multiply the value of that one statue by the thousands of antiquities and manuscripts that disappear daily, and the figures become astronomical. (Some estimates put ISIS's daily income in the millions of dollars.)

In another scene Toboni visits the Cairo Ministry of Antiquities, where a team of three men search online auction sites for stolen goods. At one point, the director holds up a Christie's Auction Catalog of a sale of Egyptian Antiquities and says, point blank, that some of the items in that sale were stolen, and that dealers falsified provenance to avoid being incriminated for trafficking in stolen cultural property.


Photo credit: Courtesy of HBO

Toboni doesn't go to Syria, but she does speak with a Syrian archaeologist, Shawnee State University professor Dr. Amr Al-Azm, who is spearheading an effort to document the destruction via a team of dedicated in-country volunteers. It's an uphill battle against a transnational criminal organization, but at least he's started the effort to stop it.  

"Egyptian Tomb Raiders" is a fascinating documentary and begs further inquiry into shady auction house practices and leads viewers to wonder why there isn't legislation that could inhibit the sale of ill-gotten antiques, at least here in the United States. In fact, bill 5703 was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2014 that would have authorized the President to impose import restrictions on antiquities from Syria.It was referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on November 24, and remained there, without action, until the end of the 113th Congress, whereupon the bill died. (Read HR 5703 here.)

At one point, Toboni asks a masked tomb raider how he feels about his job. "I feel like I am stealing from my country and selling it," he says. "But I need to feed my kids."

Watch VICE Fridays on HBO at 11 PM, 10 PM central, or stream it via HBO Now,
and catch a sneak-peek of tonight's show here.