Auction Highlights: Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books — June 13, 2024

From Havana to hallucinogenic mushrooms and Mercator to menswear, this sale is set to include a wide range of historically important and interesting material for collectors across many different categories. There is a fine contingent of New York City maps, battle plans, and bird’s-eye views; decorative maps of all corners of the globe, including the famed Leo Belgicus, maps of the “New World,” maps of colonial North America, a map of Turkey from 1486, eighteenth-century plans of Cartegena, and a startling archive of 16 consecutive issues of a rare pre-fire Chicago land development periodical.  

In the natural history section, we are graced with the beauty of several aquatints by John James Audubon as well as a set of the first octavo edition of his Birds of America, a complete folio of Robert Thornton’s spectacular Temple of Flora, truly uncommon plates from Bishop John Henry Hopkins’ Vermont Drawing Book of Flowers; and Jacob P. Giraud’s Description of Sixteen New Species of American Birds with hand-colored lithographs by Nathaniel Currier—a book published in 1841 and whose legendary rarity was already described by nineteenth-century bibliographers.

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