Timothy Ely, Consider Your Phantom Replies, hand-illustrated throughout, New York, 1982. $4,000 to $6,000.
Before being moved to its permanent home at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, a choice selection of works from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry—the most comprehensive collection of its kind—will be offered at Swann Galleries on October 10.
The archive was founded by Marvin and Ruth Sackner in 1979 in Florida. It includes more than 75,000 annotated volumes, artists’ books, book objects, periodicals, drawings, print portfolios, ephemera and manuscripts. It represents the creative pinnacle for many significant artists and poets working in the genre, alongside documentation that reveals their processes, with preparatory notes, letters and studies. The vast majority of this material will be available to scholars and the public in January 2020 at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections.
The books selected for auction at Swann includes portfolios by notable American artists and writers, foundational European Avant-Garde material, sculptural works and artists’ books that celebrate the vast range of language-based artworks and push the boundaries of what gets defined as a book. At turns humorous and sublime, kitschy and contemporary, these works were selected by our specialists as a representative offering of an outstanding collection.
Artists’ Books
Lucas Samaras, Book, color illustrated die-cut boards with 18 lithographed and collage-mounted plates, New York, 1968. $1,000 to $1,500.
Joni Mabe, The Elvis Presley Scrapbook, Athens, GA, 1982. $1,500 to $2,500.
Tom Phillips, Café Society III, micrographic diary with manuscript annotations, drawings and collage in Humbert Wolfe’s Cursory Rhymes, London, 1993. $2,000 to $3,000.
Tom Phillips, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno, three volumes, one of ten sets from the editions de tête, London, 1983. $15,000 to $25,000.
Richard Minsky, Minsky in Bed, Sag Harbor, NY, 1996. $7,000 to $10,000.
American Visual Artists
Christopher Wool, Black Book, 17 screen prints, 1989. $20,000 to $30,000.
Samuel Beckett’s Foirades with mixed media illustrations by Jasper Johns, signed by Beckett and Johns, 1976. $12,000 to $18,000.
Emmett Williams, 10 Auto-Biographical Sketches, stencil and spray paint, 1979. $700 to $1,000.
Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, 0 to 9, complete run, New York, 1967-69. $3,000 to $4,000.
Arne Wolf, From Samuel I: 17 – The Battle Between David and Goliath, 15 relief woodcuts and typeprints, 1993. $1,500 to $2,500.
European Avant-Garde
Jozef Peeters & Michel Seuphor, Het Overzicht, No. 23-24, with annotations by Peeters, Antwerp, 1925. $4,000 to $6,000.
Depero Fortunato, Liriche Radiofoniche, signed and inscribed by Depero to fellow Italian futurist Paolo Buzzi, and by publisher Giuseppe Morreale, 1934. $800 to $1,200.
Guillermo de Torre and Jorge Luis Borges, Ultra, two volumes, Madrid, 1921-22. $3,000 to $4,000.
Joan Miró & Joan Brossa, Tres Joans: Homentage a Joan Prats, 23 lithographs, 1978. $7,000 to $10,000.
Blaise Cendrars, Le Fin du Monde filmée par l’Ange N.-D. Roman, illustrated by Fernand Léger, Paris, 1919. $1,500 to $2,500.
