Auctions at Rare Book Week West
If you're in Pasadena this week for Rare Book Week West and the 49th Annual California Antiquarian Book Fair, here are two auctions this weekend that might pique your interest:
On Sunday, February 14th, both Bonhams Los Angeles and PBA Galleries will be hosting auctions. The auction at PBA, which begins first at 8:00 a.m., includes an archive of twenty-six manuscript letters signed by King Philip IV of Spain, to Luis Enríquez de Guzmán, 9th Count of Alba de Liste, his Viceroy in New Spain, written between February 1651 to February 1653. Estimate: $80,000-$120,000. Also on offer will be a Second Folio (estimate $200,000 - $300,000) and an ALS from Albert Einstein on God and physics (estimate $60,000 - $90,000).
Later the same morning, Bonhams Los Angeles is also hosting a Fine Books & Manuscripts sale. Their highlight is a first edition, first issue of On the Origin of Species from Charles Darwin. This copy has an excellent provenance as well, having been owned by Darwin's contemporary John Gwyn Jeffreys, a conchologist on several marine expeditions in the mid 19th century. Estimate: $70,000 - $90,000. At a higher price point in the same auction is Dr. Kary Mullis's 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry which is expected to bring in $450,000 - $550,000. Also on offer is a copy of History of the Indian Tribes of North America from McKenney and Hall, a highpoint of Americana collecting with its 120 hand-colored lithographs. (Estimate $40,000 - $60,000).
