Auction Highlights: Printed & Manuscript Americana — November 21, 2024

At Auction Thursday, November 21 at 10:30 AM ET

This sale strikes a particularly rich vein of western mining material from Alaska, California, Colorado, and Nevada. Highlights include the diaries of a prospector in the remote Alaskan outback; the letters of a California Gold Rush miner who was shot by an outlaw in 1853; two pungent photos of drunken miners by Nevada’s P.E. Larson; and several lots from California’s rugged Inyo County (home of Death Valley). For those who prefer more humidity, we also have several Florida-related lots, including a revealing 1787 letter from the notorious St. Augustine land speculator Jesse Fish.

Two of the highlights are seventeenth-century colonial tracts. John Eliot’s 1643 “New Englands First Fruits” is a London-printed piece describing the earliest efforts to evangelize among the Indians of Massachusetts; it also includes the first printed description of young Harvard College. Cotton Mather’s 1699 “Pillars of Salt: An History of Some Criminals Executed in this Land for Capital Crimes, with Some of their Dying Speeches” is a riveting read. Though battered and missing three leaves, we don’t see many 17th-century Boston imprints, and we find no other examples of this one at auction going back to 1916. Other key books include Vancouver’s “Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean” with a fine example of the scarce atlas volume.

The sale’s highest estimate is for an original 1833 manuscript diary of a Mormon mission to western New York with Joseph Smith. We will also offer the correspondence of a very early amateur baseball club from Oneida, NY; strong selections of Latin Americana, the American Revolution, and the Civil War; and the papers of a Pearl Harbor survivor from the USS Arizona.