The headline may be a little misleading — this is a painting by Audubon, but not by John James Audubon of Birds of America fame. Instead, this is the work of his eldest son, Victor Gifford Audubon, who assisted with the publication of Birds between 1827 and 1838, when he was in his twenties, and largely followed in the footsteps of his artist-naturalist father. 

Victor honed his craft with painting lessons in London with the Scottish artist John Wilson in the 1830s, and then returned to America in 1840 to help his father with his next major book production, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. According to the Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull, which recently sold the painting pictured above, Victor contributed “to the landscape details of the final volume, accurately depicting trees, plants, and general landscape backgrounds that he had become so talented with and fond of.”

That comes through in this oil on canvas, A View of Symonds Yat, Hudson River, New York State, a majestic and romantic scene that manifests the qualities of the Hudson River School of Art pioneered by the likes of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Asher B. Durand.

Due to Victor's “skill in depicting nature with acute accuracy,” as well as to his connection to his father’s more famous works, the painting sold at auction late last month for £10,000 ($12,600).

"Where were you during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020," will become a common query of us by generations to come. Some of us will respond with poetry--there's been plenty of time to write, and America's poets have answered Covid-19 with verse. Notably among them is Daniel Mark Epstein, who recently launched a series of sonnets created during the early days of the shelter-in-place order.

Dubbed "Cruel April: Poems from the Pandemic," Epstein's suite of ten sonnets explore the world as it has become, and our roles in it. “They are part of a larger sequence of sonnets that explore the themes of isolation, danger, and the strangeness of our new reality," Epstein explains. “The themes include the anguish of loved ones being separated, the dangers of the virus to young and old alike, and the healing power of love."

Though believed to have been originally conceived as a form to be read silently, the sonnet's intrinsic musicality of fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter lend itself to being shared aloud, and as such, Epstein, whose own accolades include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, tapped stars of the screen and stage to record themselves reading the poems: Emmy award-winning actors Tyne Daly and Paul Hecht, voice over narrator Jennifer Van Dyck, and screen legend Harris Yulin provided their voices, while visuals created at the Tivoli Arts Gallery in New York accompany the readings. As such, the series of poems is very much a multi-sensory endeavor. 

Pestilence as poetic inspiration is hardly new--the Illiad opens with Apollo punishing the Greeks with nine-day plague, while the protagonists of Boccacio's Decameron flee a disease-riddled Florence--and even now, Knopf has already published a volume of poetry created during the pandemic. “Cruel April,” meanwhile, is not a commercial enterprise--the poems are freely available online--and are intended to inspire and rally viewers to the notion that, despite our struggles with calamity and death, we can persevere, united and strong.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 (as well as his brush with death five years previously in a train crash). Sadly, lockdown has meant the cancelation of many commemorative events, though the Dickens Museum has just released the first of a new collection of colorized photographs ahead of a planned major new exhibition focusing on his image.

Hugely popular in his day, Dickens' work remains remarkably collectible in the twenty-first century as does general Dickensiana – a collar for one of his dogs sold at auction for $11,590 in 2010 and the mahogany writing table at which he was working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood at his death is currently being auctioned online by Christie’s, estimated at $12,000-18,000.

“By the time of his death in 1870, there was already an established market for Dickens’ books,” said Adam Douglas, senior specialist in rare books at Peter Harrington in London. “In fact, his eldest son Charley was able to finance the purchase of Dickens’ house, which had not been bequeathed to him, by selling the contents of his father’s library, an indication that there was already a significant market among collectors of his works."

Then, in 1912, Douglas explained, "the Dickens centenary generated renewed interest, and many collectors’ copies from that era feature the commemorative centenary stamp. Dickens’ popularity among modern collectors shows no signs of diminishing. Perhaps part of the reason is that there is something of value and interest to be found in every part of his oeuvre.”

For those thinking about starting to collect Dickens, Douglas suggests beginning with the first editions of Dickens’ major novels in demy octavo format in good contemporary bindings, while another affordable point of entry are American editions of Dickens’ works. “Dickens was also a prodigious writer of private correspondence, and his letters on a wide variety of subjects regularly come up for sale," he said.

Last week and into the weekend, book collectors experienced the ‘new normal’ in antiquarian book fairs: virtual book fairs. Marvin Getman opened his on June 2 and allowed browsers to search by keyword or by bookseller, with each bookseller posting up to a dozen items each. It was a good start, and one of things I most liked about this format was that it seemed to bring in smaller booksellers who might never have the chance to exhibit on a ‘national’ scale.

Timely material seemed to be the catch of the day. Walkabout Books sold an eyewitness account in manuscript of the Cincinnati Courthouse Riots of 1884; Alexander Rare Books offered for $100 a signed first edition of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys (2019); and Pages for Sages featured a first edition of 1665’s Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signes, Preservation From, and Cure of the Pestilence for $2,000.

The other items that stood out (to me) were:

Wyoming Mercantile was offering one of two original “blues copies consisting of eight loose prebound gathers, sometimes called a ‘check copy before publication” of John Dunning’s Deadline (1995) for $2,000, signed in a slipcase. This was the publisher’s copy, the other having gone to the author.

Also loved seeing the single unused sheet of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company letterhead stationery from the desk of Wallace Stevens that Honey & Wax Booksellers was offering for $350.

The ABAA’s virtual fair opened on June 4. There were more booksellers and more items per bookseller here, which felt more ‘fair-like’ but could also be overwhelming after a couple of hours of clicking around. The “Under $500 category” was a great idea, as were the images of individual booksellers/logos at the top of each page to ‘welcome’ browsers to their booth.

For many of us, the past three months of lockdown has meant extra time for reading. With no social or cultural events to attend, the books have beckoned. Luckily, a great selection of books about books were in the works for late spring and early summer publication. Here are the ones that I’ve been enjoying.     

Leading our nonfiction list is, of course, longtime FB&C columnist Nick Basbanes’ new book, Cross of Snow, a biography of the nineteenth-century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As I mentioned to Nick when I finished reading the galley back in April, I found it to be a balm to the senses in these tumultuous times. That it is tirelessly researched and beautifully written goes without saying—but don’t take my word for it, the Wall Street Journal praised it too. Plus, you get to read about Longfellow’s purchase of a 1496 Plutarch!  

UK booksellers Mark James and Anke Timmermann of Type & Forme have launched a virtual exhibition and accompanying catalogue to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s arrival in Australia. Botanist Joseph Banks was along for that ride aboard the Endeavour, and during the voyage from Brazil via Tahiti and New Zealand to what would later become Queensland, Australia, he discovered and documented 1,300 previously unknown botanical species.

It was Banks’ plan to publish a full catalogue of the drawings by the ship’s artist Sydney Parkinson, and to that end, upon his return to London, he employed a team of engravers to produce copper plates of the drawings, but it was an enormous and costly job. At his death fifty years later in 1820, the Florilegium remained unfinished. Two small editions were published in the twentieth century, culminating with a color edition of the surviving 738 plates printed between 1980 and 1990 by Alecto Historical Editions in association with the British Museum. The ten plates spotlighted for sale in the accompanying catalogue are from that printing, limited to 116 impressions.

Type & Forme’s online exhibition, Joseph Banks: A Lincolnshire Botanist in Australia, which runs throughout June 2020, showcases the production of the Florilegium engravings, a collaboration of botanists, artists, engravers, and printers over 200 years. By clicking through the various plants and flowers, you can follow along in Banks’ footsteps, plucking the Temnadenia Violacea in South America and the Stylidium Rotundifolium in northern Australia.

The exhibition and catalogue are only part of what the booksellers unofficially referred to as “Banks Month,” which will also include an article by Timmermann in the Book Collector about manuscript collections of the Linnean Society, a related podcast, and a social media campaign to celebrate the long history of the Florilegium. “We look forward to telling the story of Banks’ botanical discoveries and their role in the history of science, through the history of these beautiful engravings," they said.

Here are some of the sales I'll be watching this week:

Forum Auctions will sell Books and Works on Paper on Wednesday, June 3. The 238 lots include a trio sharing a top estimate of £1,000–1,500: an inscribed first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007); Edward Topsell's The Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts (1607), a translation of Gesner's Historiae Animalium; and a volume containing a second edition of Gervase Markham's Cheape and Good Husbandry for the Well-Ordering of All Beasts (1616) and a first edition of William Lawson's A New Orchard and Garden (1618), with defective works at both ends. Forty volumes of the Naval Chronicle (1799–1818) are estimated at £800–1,200, and a copy of The House of Pooh Corner (1928), in a vellum pictorial binding by the Cottage Bindery could sell for £400–600.

On Thursday, June 4, PBA Galleries sells Comic Books: Pre-Code Horror, Silver Age Marvel and Undergrounds, in 340 lots. Expected to lead the way with an estimate of $15,000–20,000 is the June 1953 Weird Mysteries #5, described as "one of the most lurid covers of the pre-Code era." The original artwork for Trina Robbins' "Wonder Person Gets Knocked Up!" (1974), which she submitted for publication in Comix Book magazine but was rejected by the editors, is estimated at $7,000–9,000. It was finally published in the 2013 volume The Best of Comix Book. A small collection of letters from S. Clay Wilson to Charles Plymell could sell for $5,000–8,000.