Moroccan Rabbinical Manuscripts, Early Declaration Broadside, FDR Presentation Copy: Auction Preview

Image: PBA Galleries

"Nova Francia" map from the 1633 Joannis de Laet Novus Orbis, offered at PBA Galleries this week.

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

At Kedem Auctions on Tuesday, January 21, Important Hebrew Manuscripts and Books from the Victor (Avigdor) Klagsbald Collection, in 200 lots. A large volume of manuscript rulings and responses by Moroccan rabbis of the eighteenth century, including a letter written by the Or HaChaim (c.1696–1743) is expected to sell for $500,000–800,000.

Ader sells 263 lots of Livres de Photographies on Tuesday, with a wide variety of mostly modern photography titles up for grabs.

Forum Auctions has 213 lots of Books and Works on Paper on Thursday, January 23, with the 1683 Traveller's Guide about laws against highwaymen rating the top estimate at £1,000–1,500. A volume of anti-Jacobin writer John Bowles' essays (about thirty titles bound together) is expected to sell for £700–900.

 At PBA Galleries on Thursday, 250 lots of U.S. Presidents from the Jim Hier Collection, with Americana, Travel & Exploration, and Cartography. Sharing the top estimate of $8,000–12,000 are a copy of FDR's Addresses of the President of the United States on the Occasion of His Visit to South America, November & December 1936, one of apparently seven copies bound in full leather and inscribed to the president of Peru; and a copy of de Laet's 1633 atlas Novus Orbis, missing the "Nova Anglia" map.

There are a handful of book-related items in the Christie's sale of Important Americana on Friday, January 24, with an eighteenth-century manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence written probably around the time of the Constitutional Convention by New York Antifederalist Samuel Jones estimated at $2–3 million. A March 1861 document signed by Abraham Lincoln and William Seward, transmitting to the Governor of New York a proposed constitutional amendment meant to attempt to stave off the start of the Civil War is estimated at $100,000–150,000, while a copy of the May 1775 Boston broadside "Bloody Butchery by the British Troops" could sell for $80,000–120,000. At the same estimate range are an August 1, 1776 Benjamin Franklin letter to his daughter-in-law, and journal of the French naval campaigns at the end of the American Revolution, kept aboard the flagship Auguste.

At Sotheby's New York on Friday, a copy of the July 1776 Exeter, New Hampshire broadside edition of the Declaration of Independence, one of just ten known copies. This copy was formerly in the collections of Thomas W. Streeter and Phillip Sang, and sold at Christie's in 2021 for $930,000. It is now estimated at $2–4 million.