Swann

Swann Auction Galleries’ (30% buyer’s premium) summer vintage poster sale in New York on August 3 received a significant boost from a single consignment.

The SS Normandie was both the apogee and the nadir of the Art Deco movement.

Early English plays provided the principal attraction in a US saleroom

The Negro Motorist Green Book, first produced in 1936, was the indispensable guide for African-American families travelling.

Complete with the often missing dust jacket and entirely unrestored, as the cataloguer’s notes were pleased to point out, a 1925 Hogarth Press first of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel Mrs Dalloway was offered as part of a March 2 sale at Swann Galleries (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of New York.

The October 13 sale of Early Printed Books at Swann Auction Galleries in New York will feature part two of the library of Ken Rapoport: English literature, tales of chivalry from the Renaissance, and more Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, Donne, and others.

Offered as part of a New York sale held by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) were the two imaginative aerial views reproduced here.

Swann Auction Galleries is holding a sale of vintage posters in New York on August 4.

The You Can Be Sure Of Shell adverts are some of the most familiar and renowned examples in British graphic design.

Italian liqueur tempts buyer to pay highest price at dedicated sale

This splendid example of the illustrative work of Edmund Dulac, a watercolour, gouache and ink drawing on paper, is his original artwork for one of the 28 plates he produced for a 1911, Hodder & Stoughton edition of Stories from Hans Andersen.

Swann Galleries is holding a sale of Books and Autographs in New York on February 17.

Seventy years ago in 1952 Swann Galleries in New York held the first auction dedicated to photographs in the US.

Modestly estimated at $3000-5000, a richly illustrated manuscript that presents in two finely bound folio volumes a pictorial record of the ‘Costumes et Plantes de L’Hindoustan’ made $80,000 (£58,395) in a New York auction.

The sale of Early Printed Books at Swann in New York on October 14 includes this author’s presentation copy of Edward Jenner’s On the Varieties and Modifications of the Vaccine Pustule, Occasioned by an Herpetic State of the Skin.

A recent sale in New York was led at $65,000 (£47,100) by a disbound but rare example of the work of Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95).

Swann’s sale of vintage posters in New York on August 5 will include this poster from 1919 designed by Charles Loupot to advertise Mekka cigarettes.

An Americana sale held by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) was led at $55,000 (£39,855) by an 1830, Palmyra first of 'The Book of Mormon'.

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.