Auctions | September 2020 | Rebecca Rego Barry

Collection of Bestselling Author Dorothea Benton Frank Heads to Auction

Courtesy of Doyle

A collection of author Dorothea Benton Frank's complete works, including a signed copy of Lowcountry Summer, all with her bookplate.

Popular for her bestselling novels about the American South where she grew up, Dorothea Benton Frank, who died a year ago yesterday, filled her suburban New Jersey home with books, art, and decorative objects. Her estate is now headed to auction later this month at Doyle in New York, where fans can bid on everything from the desk where “many of her twenty bestselling novels were written,” to her designer handbags.

Courtesy of Doyle

Fans of her writing may be most enticed by a collection of her complete works (pictured above), with one signed and all including her bookplates; or one of her many fine fountain pens, starting with the Montblanc Writers Series “Poe.” There are also four lots of bookplated cookbooks from “the author’s personal kitchen library,”--those with a Southern flair might be of particular interest. Frank's pictorial bookplate (pictured), evokes the female-centric "beach reads" for which she was known.

Courtesy of Doyle

Frank's home library.

Book collectors, however, swooning over her ornate library (pictured here at right) will eye the lot of fifty-five classics in morocco bindings on offer at Doyle. There’s also a twenty-two-volume Voltaire set in three-quarters red morocco gilt c. 1901 containing her bookplate.