H. G. Wells Private Collection Leads Heritage's Rare Books Auction
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A fine binding by 20th century French designer Paul Bonet of Si je mourais là-bas byGuillaume Apollinaire (Paris, Féquet and Baudier for Louis Broder, 1962) illustrated by Georges Braque
The Victor Gulotta Collection of H. G. Wells is one of two major private collections offered at Heritage Auctions' December 15 Rare Books Auction.
Gulotta first encountered Wells at the age of eleven when he read The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and his other early novels. Decades later, after a career spent collecting antiquities, manuscripts and literary first editions, he returned to the writer who had first ignited his imagination and built a comprehensive Wells collection spannkng fiction, nonfiction, manuscript material and association copies.
Highlights include a first edition of The Time Machine inscribed by Ray Bradbury whose note reads: “H. G. Wells was my love!” and an early autograph letter signed by Wells in 1889 written four years before the publication of his first book. Addressed to a former classmate, the letter reveals the young Wells as ambitious and already deeply engaged with the intellectual concerns that would shape his work.
The collection also includes a three-page autograph letter to Henry Davray, Wells’ chief translator and a major figure in the dissemination of his work to French audiences. In it, Wells references The First Men in the Moon and When the Sleeper Wakes. Another noteworthy association copy is the first edition of The Autocracy of Mr. Parham inscribed to writer Rebecca West, Wells’s literary collaborator and the woman with whom he had a long romantic relationship.
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The first edition of The Time Machine inscribed by Ray Bradbury
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Tolkien's handwritten corrections
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The first edition Dracula by Bram Stoker
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The Uncle Tom's Cabin fragment
Also going under the hammer and formed over 35 years is the Library of a Minnesota Collector including first editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, John Donne’s Poems (1633), George Eliot’s Middlemarch in the original eight parts and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The collection’s Tolkien material also includes a rare autograph manuscript note written by Tolkien providing late-stage corrections for The Return of the King.
Other sale highlights include:
a rare manuscript leaf from an early draft of Uncle Tom’s Cabin taken from the first chapter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
a copy of Tarzan of the Apes in the rare original dust jacket, preserved from the library of B. J. Lukes, the Edgar Rice Burroughs collector and bibliographer
a fine binding by 20th century French designer Paul Bonet of Si je mourais là-bas byGuillaume Apollinaire (Paris, Féquet and Baudier for Louis Broder, 1962) illustrated by Georges Braque
a copy of Bride of Frankenstein signed by both Elsa Lanchester and Forrest Ackerman, literary agent, collector and science fiction pioneer
“There is something wonderfully human about the way these collections were formed,” said Francis Wahlgren, International Director of Rare Books & Manuscripts at Heritage Auctions. “A lifelong love of Wells, a decades-long pursuit of condition and completeness, these are the motivations that drive meaningful collecting. The auction brings together not just great books, but great stories.”
