Swann

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.

Games manifesto from 1892 and Audubon’s classic head a selection of money-spinners.

Possibly dating from the late 16th or early 17th century, a Spanish text manuscript version of Andrea Alciato’s 1531 'Emblemata', the first and most frequently reprinted emblem book, sold for $9000 (£7030) at Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in New York.

Sporting a distinctive hairstyle and beard that the cataloguer suggested “…would never again be replicated until early 21st-century Brooklyn”, the photograph below was part of a slavery and abolition-themed lot sold for $80,000 (£64,725) in an Americana sale held in New York by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 25.

Two books from Herman Melville’s library, both volumes of classical poetry that were annotated throughout and in one instance signed, topped a recent New York sale.

Coming up for sale at Swann Galleries in New York on December 10 is an original, initialled ink and wash drawing by EH Shepard for a lesser-known work by Kenneth Grahame, Bertie’s Escapade, that was published by Lippincott in the US in 1949.

American Lance Wyman (b.1937) is regarded by many as one of the greatest graphic designers of the modern era and the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico – the first to be held in Latin America – gave him the ideal canvas to showcase his considerable talents.

Four works by the pioneering British photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853-1941) will feature in Swann Galleries’ sale of Photographs in New York on October 17.

Published in 1851 by Richard Bentley as The Whale, the first English edition of Herman Melville’s tale preceded the American issue by four weeks.