Archive: Business & Technology

National Book Auctions hosted a Sunday, December 4th auction featuring a broad range of rare antique and vintage books, as well as a fine array of atlases and ephemera. Another highlight of this auction was a large, handsome personal library of scholarly books relating to ocean liner history, interior design, art history and gardening, impressive for both its quality and condition. This 465-lot auction also featured a number of antique titles dating back to the 1600’s and other important early printings, many of which were housed in fancy leather bindings.

An 1844 printing of H. S. Tanner’s “A New Universal Atlas” fetched a hammer price of $3198.00 (including buyer’s premium). This scarce edition of this landmark atlas is beautifully illustrated with a hand-colored frontispiece showing comparative lengths and heights of rivers and mountains as well as numerous hand-colored lithographed maps.

Realizing a hammer price of $1920.00 (including buyer’s premium) was a printing of Pariser’s “Mondphotografien”. This publication is a folio volume of eleven mounted original photographic plates of the lunar surface, dated from 1894 to 1902.  Each mounting sheet bears a caption in French, indicated the time and date that the photo was captured.


A first edition of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” achieved a hammer price of $720.00 (including buyer’s premium). This printing of Twain's classic work was re-cased in a beautiful, deluxe full dark navy morocco binding with raised bands and gilt tooling.

Bringing a hammer price of $522.75 was a first edition of “Relations of the Most Famous Kingdomes and Common-wealths Throughout the World”, translated from the work of Giovanni Botero in 1630. Botero’s work marks the beginning of international demographic studies, and was also highly influential over the next generation of political and economic thinkers.

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