Swann

Sold for $150,000 (£109,490), some 10 times the low estimate, was a lot comprising 11 Xeroxed pages that constitute a pre-publication draft of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ of 1963.

Sold at $34,000 (£25,185) apiece, two very different lots headed the bidding in a New York sale of December 17.

Sporting subjects were very much in evidence and definitely among the best-sellers in an illustration art sale held in New York.

Among the highlights in the Swann auction of Vintage Posters on February 18 is this design for the French Art Nouveau shop La Maison Moderne from c.1900.

Two of the best-selling literary lots in a New York sale were copies of Jane Austen novels.

A 1633 first edition of Christopher Marlowe’s 'The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta' was a highlight at Swann Galleries (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

Swann Galleries (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) held a Travel Posters sale where one of the best-sellers was a 1939 poster for Pan Am airlines.

This original oil painting of a California grey squirrel is by John Woodhouse Audubon, younger son of John James Audubon of Birds of America fame.

Swann Galleries is holding a 476-lot sale of Old Master to Modern prints spanning the 16th to 20th centuries in New York on November 12.

Two very different lots were bid to $22,000 (£17,325) each in a sale of printed and manuscript Americana held in New York.

A 1776 first of Adam Smith’s '…Wealth of Nations' sold in a New York summer sale bore an understandably irritated inscription by the man to whom it had been gifted by its author.

Originally scheduled for the end of March, an ‘African Americana’ sale planned by Swann Galleries (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) was postponed until May 7, when it was successfully sold online with almost 90% of the 400 lots finding buyers.

Sold at $60,000 (£46,295) in a recent New York sale was a broadside, Noticia Estraordinaria, printed in Mexico City in 1836, that brought news of the fall of the Alamo in March of that year.

First editions of all of Jane Austen’s major works featured in a sale last month held by Swann Galleries (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

An album dating to c.1887 containing 64 evocative albumen prints by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, documenting Whitby, England, is on offer at New York auction house Swann.

This watercolour drawing by Charles Addams was one of the more successful lots in a December 10 Illustration Art sale held by Swann Galleries (25/20/10% buyer’s premium) in New York.