Upcoming Highlights: 19th & 20th Century Literature

At Auction May 14

Complete Catalogue Coming Soon

This sale features significant material by the man behind everyone’s favorite MI6 agent, James Bond, including a first edition of Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, as well as presentation copies of Goldfinger and Thunderball with excellent associations, and the rarest Bond title of all: a first edition, first impression of The Man With the Golden Gun that has the gilt gun stamped on the front cover.

A copy of Security Analysis, likely the first known, is on offer bearing the signature of its principal author, Benjamin Graham. This a first edition, second printing, inscribed to a Wall Street trader. Other twentieth-century titles of note are first editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and an unrestored copy of Hugo Gernsback’s foundational sci-fi novel Ralph 124C 41+ A Romance of the Year 2660, each in the original dust jacket. Fresh-to-market Ray Bradbury material from the estate of Stanley Simon includes typescripts, screen and stage treatments, early periodical appearances and all manner of ephemera, much of it signed.

Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, a first edition in the dust jacket with cover art that reproduces the frontispiece, will have its inaugural auction appearance. The Saint Dunstan edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, spectacularly bound by Trautz-Bauzonnet, is one of only 30 subscriber’s copies issued, and this is one of 12 printed in Oxford, illuminated by Nestore Leoni. From the nineteenth century comes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s copy of the reconstituted issue of the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial: A Monthly Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion, with notations in his hand.