The 1950 first edition (13th Printing) illustrated above right made $1400 (£905) and a second, revised edition of 1955 made $1300 (£840).
The sale also included a collection of signed firsts of limited edition works on angling and other sporting subjects by Frank Gray Griswold. A copy of The Cascapedia Club, privately printed at the Plimpton Press in 1920 and in original red cloth gilt and a custom made half red morocco slipcase, was sold at $2250 (£1450), and one of the scarcest of Griswold titles, The Tarpon, stitched as issued in plain wrappers in 1922 by the Gillis Press, sold at $800 (£515).
The Griswold collection was formed by one man, to whom many of the books are inscribed, but what is far more remarkable is the fact that the books were acquired by the PBA vendor en bloc at a garage sale – quite recently and for the proverbial song. A 1922 first of James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of 750 paper copies of the 1922 Shakespeare & Co. edition bound in contemporary morocco gilt, was sold at $5500 (£3550) and a signed copy of the 1947 first of James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, right, was sold at $900 (3580).
AA books and a garage sale find
Two copies of Alcoholics Anonymoussigned by the founder of movement, Bill Wilson, were among the more successful lots in an August 15 Pacific Book Auctions sale of ‘Books in all Fields’.
