“The enduring appeal of inscribed first editions, particularly those with a significant associations, was on full display and resulted in a number of high prices, including several records,” said John D. Larson, specialist for Swann Galleries’ 19th and 20th Century Literature, commenting on the company’s May 14 sale.
Ian Fleming’s James Bond was the star of the auction, with four first editions ranking among the top ten lots. A copy of “Goldfinger,” 1959, led the sale at $25,000, and featured an inscription to Sir Henry Cotton, MBE, three-time winner of the Open Championship, recommending a particular golf scene in the book. Fleming’s first Bond novel, “Casino Royale,” 1953, in the first state dust jacket, earned $18,750; a presentation copy of “Thunderball,” 1961, inscribed to Charles Douglas Jackson, a friend of Fleming’s who was posthumously revealed to be a CIA agent, brought $16,250; and the rarest Bond title, “The Man with the Golden Gun, 1965,” with the gilt gun stamped on the front cover, earned $11,050.
Auction records were set for several titles by Edgar Rice Burroughs, with an inscribed first edition of “Tarzan the Invincible,” 1931, at $3,500, and a signed first-edition presentation copy of “At the Earth’s Core,” 1922, at $3,750.
Firsts at auction included first American editions, in original dust jackets, of Gaston Leroux’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” 1911, at $12,500; and Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” 1908, at $3,500.
A scarce presentation copy of “Security Analysis,” 1934, inscribed to a Wall Street trader, was won for $20,000. The first edition is likely the first known to bear the signature of its principal author, Benjamin Graham.
Nineteenth-century titles included the first American edition of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” 1885 ($7,500); first editions, first issues of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” 1892, and “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes,” 1894 ($3,250); and a signed author’s edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” 1876 ($4,500). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s copy of the reconstituted issue of the Transcendentalist periodical “The Dial: A magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion,” 1860, with notations in Emerson’s hand, brought a record for the work at $3,250.
The auction grossed $370,371 with an 84-percent sell-through rate.
To learn more about Swann Galleries, visit www.swanngalleries.com.