Punks, goths, mods, beatniks, club kids, and hippies: a shortlist of an endless supply of social factions that make up the fabled “underground.” In the grander societal context, they are…
2024 was an eventful year for Swann that brought about exciting changes, including the reorganization of our Fine Art Department, which saw Nigel Freeman step in as the head of…
Swann’s Thursday, November 21 auction of Printed & Manuscript Americana brought $608,036, landing squarely in the pre-sale estimates, with 234 of the 320 lots offered finding buyers. Of the auction,…
This sale strikes a particularly rich vein of western mining material from Alaska, California, Colorado, and Nevada.
In the 2024 Winter-Spring season, Swann Galleries continued to provide high-quality auctions of unusual and rare material. Several single-owner collections were featured, including Illustration Art: Featuring Highlights from the Collection…
Swann closed out June 2024 with a standout Printed & Manuscript Americana sale on Thursday, June 27. The auction earned $1 million against a $647,100 to $970,700 pre-sale estimate and…
As a specialized auction house, Swann has the unique ability to connect collectors with their specific interests. This is especially true for aviation collectors; the auctions from our books and…
Our June 27 Americana sale stretches across the ages from the 1500s to the 1980s. The age of early exploration is represented by a lovely 1590 De Bry Latin printing…
Featured in the June 13, 2024, auction of Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books is Lot 166: Jacob Post Giraud, Jr. & Nathaniel Currier’s A Description of…
“The Subculture Sale was an exciting foray into relatively new territory for Swann Galleries, not focusing on works from previous centuries, but, on the personally memorable. Among the scores of…
Nicholas D. Lowry shares his picks for The Subculture Sale. Bidding open now through February 8.
Swann Galleries continued to offer exceptional auctions of quality material in 2023. The year featured several collections, including a special selection of 100 works from the Stephen White collection in…
The September 28, 2023, Americana auction is rich in material from the American Revolution and the Civil War. Highlights include early printed journals of the Continental Congress, a complete run…
Winter/Spring 2023 Brings a Record-Breaking Season for the Books & Manuscripts Department Books and manuscripts had a standout winter/spring season at Swann. “As a company whose origins are as a…
The adventure, romance, and sometimes horror of the whaling industry have never ceased drawing the attention of collectors. Here, Rick Stattler, director of books and manuscripts, shares a selection of lots that have sold at Swann with a connection to the industry.
Spring has just about sprung, and Swann Galleries’ resident Americana specialist, and director of the house’s books and manuscripts department, is sharing a selection of lots from the 2023 auction schedule that will put you in the spirit for the season.
Our April 13 Printed & Manuscript Americana auction features an exciting an array of Civil War material represented by several diaries, including an officer on a desert expedition undertaken by…
2022 was a historic year for Swann in more ways than one. The house celebrated its 80th year of auctions, bringing with it the 70th anniversary of the first photography…
Swann’s fall 2022 auction of Printed & Manuscript Americana held on September 29 earned $960k. Civil War-era material earned nearly $470,000 of that total. Collectors joined the sale through the…
Stattler explains the detective work that sometimes goes into researching an item’s history and provenance Auction houses keep one foot in the past, and one foot in the future. We are…
The highlight of our September Americana auction will be a large archive of family papers of Gideon Welles, who served as secretary of the Navy through the Civil War. Included…
The material that passes through Swann on a daily basis ranges in value and interest, sometimes we see an item crop up at auction consistently—a popular print, a highly sought…
This auction will have an emphasis on local highlights from different states and territories: an original Texas Ranger’s diary from the days of the Republic of Texas, blueprints from New…
As we close out another successful year at Swann we look back at our record-filled sales.
The New Deal not only established a great legacy, but a greater generation of artists whose works defined the American spirit.
This past summer Swann held its first auction devoted to works by women. We are pleased to annouce another edition of this sale, to be held in June 2022, once again spearheaded by Devon Eastland, our Early Printed Books Specialist, but offering a wide assortment of material
American Revolution material brings strong results, alongside Latin Americana The fall 2021 offering of Printed & Manuscript Americana was held on Thursday, September 30 delivering remarkable results across the board.…
Men did the bulk of the fighting in the Civil War, but women were involved on every level—from managing family farms and businesses in the absence of their soldier husbands,…
Manuscript diaries, broadsides, archives and more, ranging from the Revolutionary era, frontier expeditions, colonial Latin America, and more.
Early Printed Book, Archives, Vernacular and Fine Art Photography, Among other Material, Draws Interest Among Collectors The house’s inaugural Focus on Women sale on Thursday, July 15, 2021 brought $333,893…
Ahead of Swann’s first auction dedicated to the accomplishments of women on July 15, senior specialist and curator of the sale, Devon Eastland, sat down with author, historian and collector…
What You Need to Know on Auction Day This auction will be held live and conducted remotely. There will not be bidding in the room, though we accept order bids,…
Our April 15, 2021 auction of Printed & Manuscript Americana opens with a noteworthy collection of historical prints which spins a narrative of America stretching from the arrival of Columbus to the…
With the arrival of baseball’s Opening Day, spring is truly here. Swann does not handle baseball memorabilia in the traditional sense, leaving the encapsulated gem-mint rookie cards and game-worn jerseys to…
A rich offering that features a noteworthy collection of American historical prints, as well as sections of Judaica, and ephemera relating to colonization, the Civil War and Revolutionary eras, early Mexican imprints and manuscript cookbooks, as well as items covering Peru, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.
Any piece of oratory by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a part of the nation’s heritage, but the speech offered in our March 25, 2021 sale of Printed &…
“Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face!” Since the establishment of the Printed & Manuscript African Americana sale in 1996, Swann has offered a selection…
Featuring material relating to Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Phillis Wheatley, Katherine Dunham, Kool Lance, and more.
In a year that was unlike any in our lifetimes, Swann’s specialists and staff proved to be as resilient and innovative as ever, bringing forward new and safe ways to…
Our Thursday, September 24, 2020 sale of Printed & Manuscript Americana brought an 82% sell-through rate by lot, totaling over $600k with at least 23 institutions purchasing a total of…
Each summer, tourists, some of them artists, flocked to Northeastern coastal havens to cure urban fatigue, become closer with nature, and enjoy the slower pace for the season. We explore several prominent artist colonies via the artwork they inspired.
You may never have wondered about the birth of the Alaskan film industry. The first Hollywood film studio was launched in 1911, and from there the industry spread up and down the Pacific coast. Just 13 years later, The Chechahcos became the first feature film shot in Alaska. A melodrama set during the Klondike Gold Rush, no Alaskan or Wild West cliché was spared in its production. If you like glaciers, saloons, and damsels in distress, this is the film for you.
Covering a period of about five centuries and two continents, our auctions of Printed & Manuscript Americana are exceptionally varied in content and subjects covered, from colonialism and the Westward expansion of the United States, to Presidential material and first-hand accounts by ordinary persons of important historical moments.
Any experienced cataloger, scholar, collector, or reader of early printing is accustomed to discovering an array of random objects within the pages of books. Even though some of these tidbits may have fallen out of ancient beards, today we celebrate and study them and put them into categories. Devon Eastland, senior specialist for early printed books, provides a handy glossary for these curious items found within various books.
Probably the most common question we get in the Americana department is “I found an original copy of the Declaration of Independence—is it worth anything?” The short answer: it’s worth somewhere…
Among the highlights will be an 1836 autograph book with inscriptions by noted early African-American orators Moses Roper and Peter Williams. The large section on slavery and abolition will include several runaway broadsides and a miniature printing of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (the only one produced in pamphlet form) intended for soldiers to distribute among the freedmen in the south. Military papers include material written by African-American soldiers, including a Civil War letter and a Spanish-American War diary.
The value of diaries on the market is largely driven by historical content and the quality of the writing. What could your diary be worth?
William Sydney Porter, best known to posterity as the author O. Henry, was raised in North Carolina and moved west to Texas as a young man in 1882. After a stint on a sheep ranch, he settled in Austin, TX, where he worked various odd jobs while exploring his interest in writing and drawing. Our winter-spring 2020 sale of Printed & Manuscript Americana on March 10 is set to offer O. Henry’s first professional commission. Here, Rick Stattler, the house’s Americana specialist, tells the story of the mining memoir that never came to be.
This sale covers American history from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, with a diploma from the Princeton Class of 1783, whose commencement was attended by Washington and the Continental Congress; a variant printing of the Bay Psalm Book; a first edition of the earliest firsthand account of the Lewis and Clark expedition; and an unusual volume of original outsider and occult art from 1904.
Bibliophiles of every denomination—Americana, autographs, art books, archives, atlases, ephemera, literature, maps—can find their niche at Swann Galleries. Originally founded in New York as a book auction house, we hold regular specialized sales devoted to books, printed material and manuscripts.
Pictured here is Marvin Newma