Auction Highlights: Early Printed Books — October 12, 2023

The fall Early Printed Books auction on October 12, 2023, will feature lots from three important collectors, including more from Ken Rapaport, as well as works on the history of psychiatry collected by Dr. Michael H. Stone, and literary high spots amassed by the Culpepper, Virginia, bibliophile Christopher Clark Geest.

Dr. Michael Stone’s Psychiatry Collection

Left: Lot 244: Johannes Gerson, De Pollutione Nocturna, Cologne, about 1467-1472. Estimate $3,000 to $5,000. From Dr. Michael Stone’s Psychiatry Collection.

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In addition to his clinical work, research, and publications in the field of forensic psychiatry, Dr. Stone’s persistence and passion as an avid book collector resulted in the assemblage of important writings on human thought, feeling, and emotion and our struggles to understand ourselves. The collection begins with incunabula and moves through the centuries, documenting the culture’s growth from belief in the occult and witchcraft into a more scientific understanding and approach to the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness and emotional disorders. His collection reflects this depth and breadth. Expect to see works by Freud & Darwin, but also early printed English books on psychology, eighteenth-century treatises on the interpretation of dreams, and nineteenth-century assessments of the way institutionalized patients were treated and mistreated.

Ex Libris Christopher Clark Geest

Geest had a great love for literary works in the English language and focused his collecting on some of the best-known and beloved verse and prose by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burton, Swift, Burns, Johnson, and beyond. His special interest in the development of the novel in the early modern period is highlighted by number of earliest gothic novels, including first editions of Horace Walpole’s The Castle at Otranto and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Other important books include first editions of Hobbe’s Leviathan, Johnson’s Dictionary, and Spenser’s Faerie Queen, as well as Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, as extracted from Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Right: Lot 103: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, second edition, London, 1778. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.

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Other notable highlights from the sale include a group of important works in economics and a lovely run of illustrated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continental imprints documenting and illustrating antiquities. These beautifully printed and illustrated books describe engraved Roman Gems and medals, oil lamps, signet rings, coins, ivory diptychs, and other treasures held in early modern European museums and collections.

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