Our Bright Young Booksellers series continues today with Aaron Beckwith of Capitol Hill Books in Washington, DC:


IMG_3189.jpgHow did you get started in rare books?


I started working at Capitol Hill Books in 2004.  Once I proved to Jim, the owner, that I knew the alphabet (one of the few interview questions) and was fairly competent, he was generous enough to start explaining what a first edition was and how to identify one. Soon after, my friend Matt Wixon took over the online rare book operation at the store. Through our occasional trips to book sales, I started learning about this weird world of foxing, slightly chipped dust jackets, and ornery customers (and booksellers). Who can resist that?


Soon after I was making a number of dubious purchases on E-Bay. Eventually, I went to Catholic University for Library Science, and took a really great History of the Book course. I've been hooked ever since.


I understand you are in the process of buying Capitol Hill Books.  How is that going?


Things are good! As Jim always says of me to our customers, "this is the guy trying to buy me out!" Several of us who have worked at the store have a great relationship with Jim and have been discussing it with him for awhile. We have a deep love for the place and are ready to keep the store humming when Jim wants to retire.


Matt Wixon, the friend I mentioned above, actually started a moving company, Bookstore Movers, to raise the funds to buy the store, and the two companies support each other in a number of ways. A few employees, such as myself, have worked for both businesses and fill in at whichever place needs help that day.  We are allies and we'll be around to support each other for many years to come.  


We've got enough to keep us busy in the meantime.  Last fall the bookstore partnered with the Poet Laureate office at the Library Congress to host a Day of the Dead Dance Party. We built an altar to Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott, and Carrie Fisher, all authors that had passed in the last year. We drank mezcal rickys and danced as only librarians and booksellers can--with nerdy exuberance and capes.


On a recent trip to Mexico, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with a fellow used bookstore, A Través del Espejo. In the memorandum, the two stores agreed to become "sister stores" and engage in activities that "promote friendship between Mexican and American readers, and foment increased understanding of the literary cultures that exist in each country." We plan to return at least once a year to take them some books, explore the taco scene, and do some book scouting ourselves.


What do you love about the book trade?


I've been lucky enough to have a number of mentors who have shown me the ropes, and making those unexpected relationships has been particularly special. Jim is certainly number one. Erik Delfino was my professor at Catholic University and taught the History of the Book class. This was at the height of e-readers and "The Book Is Dead!" hysteria. Erik was able to contextualize all of this from the oral tradition, to sumerian tablets, to the codex, moveable type, and on up to audiobooks and e-readers. He calmed us all down and taught a great course in the process.


Another whole world opened up when I met Brian Cassidy, who introduced me to CABS (Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminars), or Rare Book Camp, as I think of it.  There, I saw how varied the booksellers' and librarians' interests were.  Everyone got excited when talking about their collecting or research specialties (whether death, carnivals, or some esoteric binding technique), and there was this great "Oh you like weird stuff, too!" series of epiphanies.  


The trade runs the gamut with old salts, new salts, and wide-eyed naifs like me. Just about everyone has been eager to share advice, though, including "I hope you don't want to make money."  I don't, so we're good there!


Describe a typical day for you:


Every Thursday, I borrow Jim's car for what we call "the circuit."  I drive all over the DMV looking for books, both general store stock or more rare stuff. I'll fill up a couple carts, focusing on $7 paperbacks. The first question upon my return is whether I found any Vonnegut or Murakami, but I sometimes find some rare gems along the way.


I drive the loaded car back to the shop, and usually enter to find Jim in great mental distress due to a customer using one of the words that is banned in our store (sweet, like, perfect, Amazon, OMG, etc) "Gahhhhhh!  You're giving me braaaaaaain damage!"


After the proper excoriation, we have our weekly informal happy hour with the "Destickering Crew".  These are a rotating cast of friends and roustabouts who come to the store after we close to take the stickers off the books, drink, make book puns and, ideally, not talk too much about politics. The night generally ends with margaritas, chili con queso and, of course, more book talk.


Favorite rare book (or ephemera) that you've handled?


That's tough, because in Library Science school at CUA we were able to tour the rare book collections of all the major institutions in DC, and at the Library of Congress, for instance, they played all the hits. So getting to see some early Galileo, or all of Charles Dickens's first editions at one time was pretty dang cool.  


My favorite, though, was a self-made Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. It came from Israel and whoever had owned it had created their own monsters and included extensive descriptions (in Hebrew) and drawings. It was fascinating to look at, and the time period worked out that this author was in Israel playing D&D at the same time I was a husky lad doing the same up in Michigan. He or she created two of their own monsters, and I was drawn to the care and creativity that went into it.  The manual ended up being my first ever book fair sale, so I have fond memories.


What do you personally collect?


It's become increasingly hard to distinguish what I'm collecting for myself, and what I'm just holding on to for a couple years before selling. But looking at my shelves now, there's a lot of books from the WW1 and the Lost Generation, the remnants of a hypermodern fetish, Wodehouse Penguins, Virginia Woolf, and a lot about food, cooking, and cocktails.


I also just started a collection of casual dining menus from places like T.G.I. Friday's, Applebee's, IHOP, etc. I recently read that Applebee's used to have quail on the menu, so really hoping to track that one down at some point.    


What do you like to do outside of work?


Mainly I like to travel, cook, and read. Though I rarely get to play these days, 4-Square, the old playground game, is probably my favorite past-time. I'll bring some chalk and a ball to the next book fair.


I've been swimming more and more too. Mostly I do a lazy, frolickey backstroke while staring at the ceiling of the pool trying to think of anagrams for "incunabula."


Thoughts on the present state and/or future of the rare book trade?


I'm pretty new to the trade, so it's a little tough for to say anything with any authority. I've been thinking more about nostalgia cycles though, and I'd guess there's some previously unconsidered 80s or 90s items that we'll start seeing soon on the margins of the book trade, something like early Trapper Keepers.


One idea we want to follow through on at Capitol Hill Books is to host some booksellers at the shop every now and then. We'd have them set up a small display and give a talk about their experiences in the book trade, or their specialty, or wherever they wanted to take it. The trade has so many interesting, vibrant personalities, and having a space to share that and bring together the disparate parts of the DC book community would work well.


Any upcoming fairs or catalogues?


We did our first catalogue on Hemingway and the Lost Generation last winter, and it was a blast to put together. We were able to partner up with the Pen Faulkner Foundation, Shakespeare Theater Company, and Riverby Books, our fellow booksellers on Capitol Hill. We met a lot of cool book and theater people, and sold a fair bit at our rare book pop-ups.


In the next year, we'll focus a little more on events. We're doing three book fairs - Ann Arbor, Richmond, and Washington, DC.  In the shop, we'll continue to host our monthly free wine and cheese parties. Book people plus free booze always equals interesting times.


A friend also brings in a couple kegs of homebrew to the shop every month or two. He's been called the Björk of Homebrewing. We're certainly not above bribing people to buy our books, and it works every time.

































Churchill 1.pngWith two Oscar-nominated films, Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour, plus a third, Churchill, hoisting Winston Churchill into the spotlight of late, bookseller Maggs Bros. of London has taken the opportunity to share in the excitement with a little contest. Take a look at this original pen and ink cartoon of Churchill by "Pooh" illustrator E. H. Shepard, drawn for Punch magazine in 1947 and titled "Leonardo da Winny." The former PM and amateur painter is depicted in his studio, at work on a canvas (deliberately painted upside-down) featuring his successor, Clement Attlee. But what is Attlee doing with his left hand? (See detail below.) It's anybody's guess, and Maggs is offering a "small reward" for the correct answer. (Contact here.) The drawing itself is for sale at £12,500.

Churchill 2.pngChurchill collectors might also be interested to know about another Maggs offering: a complete six-volume set of first editions of his book, The World Crisis, which were initially gifted to Maurice Hankey, a senior civil servant in Churchill's war administration. Each volume except the first is personally inscribed, and one contains a handwritten letter from Churchill, noting the gift for Hankey's library. Of Hankey, Churchill had written in The World Crisis: "He knew everything; he could put his hand on anything; he knew everybody; he said nothing; he gained the confidence of all." The set is priced at £50,000.   

Images courtesy of Maggs Bros.

Before we look ahead to this week's sales, a quick update on the volume from George Washington's library that was offered on Saturday: it sold for $115,000.

                                                                                                                                                                         Three sales to watch this week, all on Wednesday, January 31.

                                                                                                                                                                                 At Dominic Winter Auctioneers, Printed Books, Maps & Documents, in 565 lots. Includes the Edward Elgar collection of Peter and Anne Duckers (lots 229-277) and the second part of David Lansley's collection of Lewis Carroll (lots 405-434), and there are many lots of interest to the geology buff. An Elgar autograph manuscipt for an offertorium performed at the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911 is estimated at £3,000-5,000, as is a James Boswell letter to Catharine Macaulay. Sir Hugh Walpole's copy of Dombey and Son in original parts could fetch £1,000-1,500. A 1635 London Bible in an elaborately-decorated binding (pictured) is estimated at £400-600.

                                                                                                                                                                       

binding.pngAn online sale of Books and Works on Paper in 175 lots from Forum Auctions; most of the estimates for this sale are in three figures. Among the lots that struck me are Patrick Woodroffe's original dust-jacket artwork for a 1973 edition of Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man (est. £600-800), a group lot of Golden Cockerel Press books (£300-400) and a first edition in wrappers of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Parasite (£150-200).

                                                                                                                                                                                  Chiswick Auctions hosts a Printed Books & Manuscripts sale, in 132 lots. A much-altered 15th-century Book of Hours in a contemporary binding is estimated at £1,500-2,500, while a copy of the Olympia Press first edition Lolita could sell for £1,200-1,500. A lot of 41 volumes of the Tauchnitz editions of P.G. Wodehouse could fetch £800-1,200. A manuscript introduction and various associated documents relating to William Johnstone White's Sketches of Characters (1818) is estimated at £100-150.

                                                                                                                                                                                Image credit: Dominic Winter Auctioneers

Shakespeare copy.jpgAbove: The first recorded purchase of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, less than two months after it was entered in the Stationers' Register. Richard Stonley, a government accountant, spent 12 pence on two books, Venus and Adonis and John Eliot's The Survey, or Topographical Description of France, in addition to 10 shillings on food and 3 shillings, 12 pence on clothes.


Since 1997, UNESCO's Memory of the World Register has raised awareness of the state of preservation of civilization's documentary heritage by nominating a series of books or other documents that speak to our common history. Looting, war, illegal trading, and general lack of interest stirred UNESCO members to establish an annual list of documents that have national or global social relevance. The first inductees into the program included the Archangel Gospel of 1092, a collection of Mexican Codices, and a Holy Koran, and since then the register has grown to include the Magna Carta and the Gutenberg Bible. This international initiative calls for the preservation or, in some cases, the reconstitution of a country's documentary heritage -- creating a sense of permanence for these materials in an increasingly impermanent (read: digital) world.

This year, 90 documents relating to William Shakespeare's life have been added to the register, mostly dealing with his baptism, burial, property records, and business transactions. Six of those documents hail from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection -- the only American institution included -- while the remaining 84 documents are in the United Kingdom's Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the National Archives, Worcestershire Archives and Archaeology Service, the College of Arms, the British Library, and London Metropolitan Archives.

The Shakespeare documents are accessible to anyone with internet access: they've all been scanned and uploaded to an online repository called "Shakespeare Documented," launched on the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death in 2016. With (appropriately) 400 items in its holdings, the site bills itself as "the largest and most authoritative resource for learning about primary sources that document the life and career of William Shakespeare." This comprehensive portrait of the playwright offers hundreds of print and manuscript documents for in-depth examination, including contemporary accounts (and gossip), anthologies, literary criticism and diary entries--all providing testimony to how Shakespeare became a household name.

"The fact that these resources -- supplied by a number of institutions -- have been digitized and are widely available means that a vital part of the documentary record is able to speak to us from centuries past. If libraries are diary of humankind, this group of documents represents one of that story's most exciting chapters," said Folger Shakespeare Library Director Michael Witmore.

In an age where longevity of e-data is of increasing concern, to quote the Bard himself, "What's past is prologue" (The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I). In other words, we cannot forget history's lessons, or we are forever doomed to repeat them, and UNESCO's initiative is a positive step in the right direction.


Credit: Richard Stonley. Diary labelled "KK." Manuscript, May 1593 to May 1594. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Should your travels bring you to Cambridge, Massachusetts, this spring, chart a path toward Harvard's Houghton Library, where Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration opened last week. Curated by Peter X. Accardo, the exhibition showcases sixty literary maps that bring to life such imagined places as More's Utopia and Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. Here are a few highlights:   

Baum Tik Tok of Oz copy.jpgProfessor Wogglebug's Map of the Marvelous Land of Oz, attributed to L. Frank Baum. From: L. Frank Baum, Tik-Tok of Oz (Chicago, 1914). "This first printed map of the Marvelous Land of Oz presents its four counties in their official colors, but reverses the position of Munchkin and Winkie Counties. The inconsistency is also reflected by the map's compass points, where East unusually is to the West, and West is to the East." Credit: Houghton Library, Typ 970.14.1955 - Presented in honor of Dennis C. Marnon, 2018.

Cervantes Quixote copy.jpgA double-page copperplate map of a Portion of the Kingdom of Spain by Tomas Lopez. From: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hildalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Madrid, 1780). "Their route is delineated in red; the numbers added along the way are keyed to thirty-five episodes listed in an elegant cartouche surmounted by loyal Panza and Quixote's empty suit of armor." Credit: Houghton Library, *SC6.C3375.B617d 1780 (B) - Gift of William Carmichael, 1782.

Scudery Clelie copy.jpgFold-out, hand-colored "Carte de Tendre," attributed to François Chauveau. From: Madeleine de Scudéry, Clélie, histoire romaine (Paris, 1654). "Multiple suitors cause the novel's heroine Clélie to create a Map of Love, originally conceived by de Scudéry as a society salon game. Three paths to spiritual love emanate from the city of New Friendship, leading in the west to Recognition, in the north to Esteem, and in the east to Inclination." Credit: Houghton Library, *75-193 - Amy Lowell fund, 1975.

The exhibition remains up through April 14.

Images courtesy of Houghton Library

AWizardOfEarthsea(1stEd).jpgUrsula K. Le Guin, one of the great writers of the 20th century, passed away Tuesday at her home in Portland, Oregon. She was 88 years old. Although commonly considered a science fiction author, Le Guin was also widely recognized as a literary voice of significant depth and insight. Le Guin's sophisticated inquiries into gender, environmentalism, anarchism, taoism, anthropology, sociology, and psychology often played out against fantastical or futuristic backdrops in her fiction. Among her many books, which achieved both literary respect and commercial success, were The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Wizard of Earthsea


Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, the daughter of prominent American anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. She graduated from Radcliffe University in 1951, continuing on to earn a Master's degree from Columbia in 1952. While on a Fulbright fellowship to Paris she met and married Charles Le Guin. The two settled in Portland, Oregon, where they raised three children together. She published her first novel Rocannon's World, in 1966. Two years later she published The Wizard of Earthsea, the first in the popular and acclaimed Earthsea series, which launched her career and became a classic of the fantasy genre. Within the next few years, she would publish several books that would also become undisputed classics in the science fiction canon: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and The Dispossessed (1974).


220px-TheLeftHandOfDarkness1stEd.jpgFor collectors of science fiction and fantasy in the 20th century, Le Guin was already a must-have, but as her reputation has continued to grow beyond genre fiction (see, for example, the recent Library of America editions of her work), Le Guin's works properly belong on the shelf of any collector of 20th century literary fiction as well. 


Images via Wikipedia




Almost a year ago today, book artist Richard Minsky announced his purchase of a 1935 first edition It Can't Happen Here, a dystopian political novel by Sinclair Lewis that experienced a surge in popularity after the 2016 presidential election. At the time, Minsky wrote, "I'm thinking about materials to use for a book shrine, like Pop Delusions, or whether it should be a reading chair, like Freedom of Choice." The product of that creative spark is a stunning binding that combines leather, gold, paint -- and the artist's blood.    

ichh2a-500-12.jpgAs a longtime contributor to FB&C, Minsky hardly needs an introduction here, but I would like to note that he recently received the 2017 Guild of Book Workers Lifetime Achievement Award for service to the profession of the book arts. Now that his latest "book shrine" has been completed, I wanted to hear more about this compelling project.

RRB: Tell me about the impetus for this undertaking. Had you read It Can't Happen Here before?

RM: I read it for the first time after the 2016 election, when it garnered a lot of attention and again became a bestseller. My original intention wasn't to do a binding. In the novel the protagonist is a newspaper editor in Vermont. A populist buffoon is elected president of the USA and becomes a demagogue. All laws were made to benefit corporations. The editor and other members of the New Underground Resistance steal "an old hand printing-press" from the basement of the newspaper office, and take 8-point type, a pocketful at a time. They publish a four-page pamphlet titled Vermont Vigilance. One way of distributing the pamphlets was to surreptitiously insert them into other publications.
     Last April I was Artist-in-Residence at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology, where I reified the fictional pamphlet, printing Vermont Vigilance on the Kelmscott/Goudy Albion handpress that William Morris acquired to print The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Frederic Goudy brought the press to America in 1924. I designed the pamphlet using typefaces that existed at the time of the story, and planned to insert them into copies of the first edition of the book.

box2opena700.jpgRRB: You made two bindings, right? One white goatskin, the other calf? Will there be more?

RM: The first binding was alum-tawed goatskin with an inlaid panel made to look like pied 8-point type in a pool of black ink, covered in blood. The type is Garamont, a face Goudy designed in 1921. The original drawings for Garamont are in the Cary Collection. Some of the red on the cover is my blood, but most of it is acrylic paint, which looks more like fresh blood than blood does after a short time. The front endpaper is the first leaf of Vermont Vigilance, and the back endpaper is the folded pamphlet.
     I just finished a second copy, in black calf, with Vermont Vigilance as the basis of the panel. For this one I inserted the pamphlet rather than glued it in. Both versions use the same copper die for stamping the gold spine, and I've stamped three additional alum-tawed skins with the spine design, in case I locate additional copies of the first edition suitable for binding.

RRB: Why was it important to you to use blood? Have you ever done that before--or heard of another binder doing it?

                                                                                                                                                                    RM: I used my blood because it evokes a metaphor of the book--that people are willing to give their blood to resist fascism. Many of the characters are bloodied. Some survive, some die. The images on the covers represent what happens when the Corpos discover where the resistance is printing the pamphlets. The headline in Vermont Vigilance is "How Many People Have the Corpos Murdered?"
     I haven't used my blood before as a metaphoric material, though I occasionally have put a drop on a work to provide DNA authentication. I haven't seen any other bookbindings that use the binder's blood, but I'm certainly not the first artist to use their blood as a significant material in their work. Barton Lidicé Beneš immediately comes to mind. Lethal Weapons was a series of works created in the 1990s with his own HIV-infected blood.

Images courtesy of Richard Minsky

Forum Auctions in London holds a sale of Fine Books and Works on Paper on Thursday, January 25, in 385 lots. A John Wesley autograph letter rates the joint top estimate, at £8,000-12,000. Sharing the honors is a complete set of the French art magazine Verve: Revue Artistique et Littéraire (1937-1960). A group of seventeen ink and watercolor drawings by Charles Edward Brock for a 1908 edition of Sense and Sensibility is estimated at £6,000-8,000, and the Laurence Hodson copy of the Doves Press Bible could fetch £5,000-7,000.

                                                                                                                                                    

Austen Inscription

                                                                                                                                                There are a couple interesting association copies at this sale: a first edition of Jane Austen's collected works (1833) presented by Austen's favorite niece, Fanny Catherine Knight Knatchbull, to her daughter Louisa in 1856 (£2,000-3,000 - pictured), and the Doves Press edition of Milton's Aereopagitica (1907) presented by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson to his son Richard (£800-1,200).

                                                                                                                                                               A much-annotated Latin Bible (Louvain, 1569) is estimated at just £500-700.

                                                                                                                                             Also on Thursday, Americana - Travel & Exploration - Cartography at PBA Galleries, in 500 lots. 

                                                                                                                                            See Rebecca's post from last week for the big highlight of the January 27 Winter Fine Art and Antiques sale at Case Antiques, Inc., the volume from George Washington's library which later belonged to John Marshall (est. $28,000-32,000). This sale also contains a few other books from Marshall's library.

                                                                                                                                             Potter & Potter hosts a Fine Books & Manuscripts sale on Saturday, in 563 lots. These include a notable variety of material related to Harry Truman from the collection of his Appointment Secretary, Matthew J. Connelly, and to Connelly's trial for conspiracy to defraud the United States, which ultimately led to a pardon by President Kennedy in 1962. The pardon certificate is among the lots for sale, estimated at $7,000-9,000. A suit once owned by Lee Harvey Oswald is estimated at $15,000-20,000.

                                                                                                                                                          A rare J.D. Salinger letter to a fan could fetch $7,000-9,000, and a Walt Whitman postcard to the poet Gabriel Sarrazin is estimated at $4,000-6,000.

                                                                                                                                                            Image credit: Forum Auctions

The Beatrix Potter Society has been keeping tabs on all sorts of various Potter-related events as well as preparing for a springtime gathering in California. Here's some of the highlights from its winter newsletter:                                                                                                                                                                               

squirrel nutkin.JPGThe Bookseller reported in December that a first-edition of Potter's long-forgotten and recently published The Tale of Kitty in Boots, with illustrations by Quentin Blake, was auctioned at the "First Editions Re-covered" sale, fetching nearly $14,000. The event raised funds for Blake's House of Illustration, a public art gallery in London. The two-hour event raised approximately $180,000. 


In 2016, the Royal Mint struck a series of coins commemorating the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter's birth, and plans to add new coins to the series in 2018. This year Mrs. Tittlemouse, the Tailor of Gloucester, Flopsy Bunny, and a new version of Peter Rabbit will appear on the 50-pence coins. The proclamation announcing the series appeared in the December 15 edition of the Edinburgh Gazette.


The United Kingdom's National Trust celebrated 50 years of its Working Holiday program--an initiative aimed at encouraging participants to help care for and restore Britain's beautiful coastlines, homes, and gardens--by planting 4,000 saplings near Moss Eccles Tarn in Cumbria's Lake District. Stocked with water lilies and various fish, Potter once owned this charming fishing spot and donated it to the National Trust upon her death. Volunteers helped clear non-native plants to make room for the new trees--native oak, birch, and hazel.


Finally, the next meeting of the Potter Society will take place March 23-25 in San Diego, California. Among other activities--British afternoon tea on Saturday, for example--author Marta McDowell and librarian Connie Rye Neumann will share new research on the surprisingly parallel lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Potter.  

                                                                                                                                                                       Spring can't get here soon enough. 

                                                                                                                                                                  Image via Wikimedia Commons

Paging the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union ... Coming up for auction on January 27 at Case Antiques in Knoxville, Tennessee, is George Washington's signed copy (and bearing his armorial bookplate) of The Massachusetts Magazine: or Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment, volume 1, published by Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews of Boston in 1789.

GW SB #1.jpgWhy page the Ladies? Well, they did pay nearly $10 million for Washington's annotated copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in 2012. Washington-owned and signed books are coveted items. Also in 2012, Heritage Auctions sold his signed (and bookplated) copy of A View of the History of Great-Britain (1782) for just over $100,000. In 2013, seven books from the first president's library sold at Sotheby's for a total of $1.2 million, some signed, some only with bookplate.

Aside from the autograph and bookplate, what makes the volume now headed to auction so special is trifold, said John Case, president of Case Antiques. First, this copy has associative value, as it was later owned by Chief Justice John Marshall. "Marshall and Washington were close friends," Case said, citing another lot in the auction, a letter from Washington to Marshall that demonstrates this relationship. Second, Marshall's descendant, Lewis Minor Coleman, Jr., noted the book's provenance on the front endpaper (pictured below)--and this too is a selling point because it records the fact that the book resided in both Washington's and Marshall's library. And third, according to Case: "A remaining desirable factor is the subject matter of the book, as it is contemporary to the time of Washington by a well known publisher and patriot, Isaiah Thomas, on subjects including the 1789 inauguration of President Washington."

GW 2.jpgThe auction estimate for this volume is a conservative--or should we say federalist?--$28,000-32,000. Several other lots related to John Marshall will also be offered at the sale.

Images courtesy of Case Antiques