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The
Frank Streeter Collection
by
William S. Reese
Frank Sherwin Streeter was a book collector for forty years,
from around 1966 until his death in 2006.
Over that time he formed a wonderful collection of books, pamphlets and
maps on the exploration of the Pacific and the
Arctic
, travels in the
United States
, atlases, early navigational
guides, and more theoretical works on mathematics and cosmography related to
navigation. By the time of his
death his collection was one of the most distinguished to be formed in his
fields of interest. Like most
collections, it grew organically as it progressed, and as Frank’s knowledge
deepened or interests changed. It
was certainly an endeavor which gave him great pleasure, and perhaps more
importantly for him, brought him into genial contact with many like-minded
people, most especially his fellow members of the Walpole Society.
(Note 1, Frank Streeter’s collection was sold by Christie’s
New York
on
April 16-17, 2007
.
Their well-executed two-volume catalogue, The
Frank S. Streeter Library
Important Navigation, Pacific Voyages, Cartography, Science, provides a
detailed record of Frank’s collection, and will be referred to in this
article as “FSS Sale” with the appropriate lot numbers.
Details of buyers at the sale are based on the sale room observations
of William Reese. All prices
quoted from auctions of any period are inclusive of the fees being charged by
the houses at the time of the sale.)
In some ways it is surprising that Frank became a book
collector at all; standard texts on children rebelling against their parents
would predict the opposite. Frank’s
father, Thomas W. Streeter, was
without doubt the greatest
Americana
book collector of the 20th
century, and a major figure in the American book world from 1920 to 1965, as a
bibliographer, collector, and supporter of rare book libraries.
Frank wrote engagingly about his father as a collector in the 1984 Note
Book. (Note 2, Frank S.
Streeter, “Recollections of Thomas W.
Streeter and his Collecting,” The
Walpole
Society Note Book
1984, pp. 43-51.) As he narrates,
his father was a rather remote figure to his children, far more interested in
his books then them. Frank told me
that all of the Streeter children formed an antipathy to book collecting after
their playroom was taken over to be a library.
As long as his father was alive Frank had no interest in following a
very hard act.
When Thomas W. Streeter
died in 1965, he required his executors to sell his books at auction, or at
least those that were deemed worthy of individual lots.
First, though, he left each of his children their choice of a book from
his collection as a remembrance. One
of Frank’s brothers chose a non-book object instead, while his sister took
an inscribed copy of Henry Thoreau’s A
Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers (
Boston
, 1849).
Henry Streeter picked the first edition of Samuel Champlain’s Les
Voyages… (
Paris
, 1613), a book he later gave
to the American Antiquarian Society, where Thomas Streeter had been President
from 1952-55, and where Henry was on the Council for several decades.
Despite this selection, the Champlain inspired no particular love in
Henry of early Canadiana. Frank
picked a very different era and style of book, Henry Warre’s Sketches
In North
America
And The
Oregon
Territory (
London
, 1848).
Warre was a British army captain who was sent on a perilous mission
with dispatches across
Canada
to the Oregon Country at the
height of the political crisis with
Great Britain
over its ownership in 1846.
In the end his breakneck trip across the continent was a moot point,
but Warre employed his time usefully by making a wonderful series of
watercolors while crossing the
Rockies
and in
Oregon
.
On returning to
London
, Warre published these in a
color plate book which is one of the most beautiful illustrated works on the
American West. Acquiring the Warre
had a great impact on Frank, and it remained one of his favorite books to the
end of his life. After any copy
appeared at auction, Frank would quickly be on the phone to me to find out
what it had sold for and the circumstances.
Although never a close tracker of price trends (one well-known
collector I knew caused the front boards to pop off many of his books by
stuffing clipped notes on advancing prices inside the front cover) he took the
greatest pleasure in watching the rise in value of the one book for which he
had paid nothing.
The Thomas W. Streeter
sale, held at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1966-69, was a landmark in every way.
It was the greatest book sale held in the
United
State
in decades in terms of its
contents, and had the most elaborate catalogue, in seven volumes and an index,
ever prepared for an American book auction up to that point.
At that time the idea of long notes explaining the material was a
revolutionary one for the auction houses, who provided no estimates, and
assumed that a collector would retain a dealer to advise them and bid for
them. The notes were largely drawn
from Tom Streeter’s own working notebooks, or from the penciled notes he had
written on the items themselves. With
the confidence of a man who knew his provenance was going to add value
someday, he wrote those notes firmly with a very sharp No.
1 pencil on even the rarest material.
He also infused credit into the sale by leaving bequests to a number of
institutions, many of whom spent the proceeds at the auction, allowing various
libraries to acquire material while advancing prices at the same time.
In the end the whole sale realized $3,102,982, at that time a record
for any book auction (at least in nominal dollars), and a result that allowed
Frank to feel he had some book-related money to spent on books.
(Note 3, The Celebrated
Collection Of Americana Formed By The Late Thomas Winthrop Streeter (New
York, 1966-69, in seven volumes, index 1970.) Notes on buyers at the TWS sale
are based on William Reese’s copy of the catalogue, which collates the
annotated saleroom notes of a number of the major participants).
With the Warre as a catalyst and his father’s sale offering
a string of treasures in extensive sessions every six months, Frank took the
next step in collecting and started bidding.
It is impossible to tell what his first purchase was with certainty,
because later in his career Frank bought a number of books which had belonged
to his father as well as those he actually acquired at the auction.
Forty-one books with TWS sale provenance eventually appeared in the FSS
sale. It seems unlikely that he
bid at the first two sessions, but at the third session in October, 1967 an
astute observer (Archibald Hanna of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, who had negotiated the purchase of Thomas Streeter’s famed Texas
collection for Yale) spotted him as the successful bidder on three lots;
William Bullock, Sketch Of A Journey
Through The Western States… (
London
, 1827) (TWS sale 1365, FSS
sale 78), John Woods, Two Years’
Residence In
Illinois
…
(
London
, 1822) (TWS sale 1437, FSS
sale 533), and William Oliver, Eight
Months In
Illinois
… (
Newcastle
, 1843) (TWS sale 1478, FSS
sale 397). I suspect this is the
occasion on which the photograph which serves as the frontispiece to his own
sale catalogue showing Frank bidding may have been taken, because he soon
decided it was better to seek the advice of dealers and bid through them.
It remains somewhat of a mystery what his interest in fairly standard
Midwestern travel books may have been, but he acquired a number more in the
first several years of his collecting. In
any case, he had crossed a Rubicon that every collector reaches – he had
gone out and spent what was at the time quite a bit of money for several small
objects only because he liked them.
At this point Frank, a methodical businessman, must have
given the whole business some serious reflection.
If he was going to be a book collector, as seemed to be happening, what
did he really want to collect? His father’s overarching theme was the idea
of Americana Beginnings – the earliest books about, or printed in,
North America
from the beginning of discovery through the Alaska
Gold Rush. Frank spent World War
II in the Navy, in the
Caribbean
and then in the Pacific. Here
he had learned to deal with the practical issues of seamanship and navigation.
He had also been a student of Samuel Eliot Morison while an
undergraduate at Harvard, and could temper what he learned of maritime history
with his real experience in the sea and navigation, especially in the Pacific
area. As he wrote to Marcus
McCorison at the American Antiquarian Society a few years later, “As a naval
officer with some service in the Pacific in World War II, that region has
quite fascinated me….” (Note 4, FSS letter of Jan.
13, 1970 to Marcus McCorison, AAS archives.) Between the third and
fourth sessions of his father’s sale he evidently reached a resolution.
In the fourth session, in April, 1968, the Thomas Streeter
sale reached Pacific Voyages (the whole sale catalogue is arranged topically).
This time Frank was systematic. He
retained the services of Michael Walsh of Goodspeed’s Book Shop in
Boston
to represent him.
Mike was one of the most experienced veterans in the business, having
started working at Goodspeed’s as an errand boy in 1909, and managing the
Americana
department since 1915.
(He was still minding the store in 1982, aged 88, when I walked in on a
hot sleepy day in August to discover that he was going without lunch because
no other staff were there. I
watched the store for him for fifteen minutes while he went out to get a
sandwich.) Mike had been one of the three booksellers who had appraised the
Thomas Streeter library after his death (the other two were Roland Tree of
Henry Stevens, Stiles, and Lindley Eberstadt of Edward Eberstadt & Sons).
Mike was a perfect guide, and Frank brought home four books, the best
being a magnificent copy, with the plates most unusually hand-colored, by
Sydney Parkinson, A Journal Of A Voyage
To The
South Seas
…
(
London
, 1773), one of the primary
accounts of James Cook’s first voyage by the naturalist on board (TWS sale
2406, $950; FSS sale 402, $48,000 to Heald).
It was another year before more major Pacific voyages came up
at the sixth session of the sale in April of 1969.
By this time Frank had evidently further refined his focus to be “the
exploration for a
Northwest Passage
and in the opening up of the
Pacific in the 18th century.” With expansion into other Arctic
books, and the exploration of the Pacific until the mid-19th
century, these themes remained central to Frank’s collecting for the rest of
his career. While it is not
possible to tell if all of the lots were acquired at the sale, he ended up
with fifteen lots from the Northwest voyages which appeared there, with such
classics as Vancouver, the first British voyage to Hawaii and the Northwest
Coast after Cook (TWS sale 3497, $1300; FSS sale 510, $72,000 to Arader),
Broughton, who executed the first detailed surveys of Puget and Nootka Sounds,
(TWS sale 3500, $1100, FSS sale
73, $36,000 to order), and Krusenstern, one of the primary accounts of early
Russian voyages to the Northwest Coast in an association copy (TWS sale 3505,
$850, FSS sale 304, $38,400 to Harrington).
(Note 5, For a full view of Frank’s holdings from session six of TWS
sale, see FSS sale 73, 82, 117, 160, 161, 162, 201, 262, 301, 311, 328, 339,
362, 374, 510.) Frank also began in this session to collect the pamphlets
around the so-called Dobbs-Middleton controversy, based on the disparate
arguments of whether or not there was a western outlet from
Hudson
’s Bay into a
Northwest Passage
.
This dispute evolved into a pamphlet war between Arthur Dobbs, a
merchant and later British governor of
North Carolina
and the ship captain
Christopher Middleton. Some of the
pamphlets in this shrill war of words have long been regarded as the black
tulips of early Arctic voyages, and one of the minor triumphs of Frank’s
collection was his ultimate success in getting them all, beginning in 1969 and
ending in 1997. (Note 6, See FSS
sale 155-162, 362, and 363. At the
sale they were bitterly fought over, all but one going to a determined phone
bidder, #1702, who presumably already had the one that got away.)
By the end of the Thomas Streeter sale, Frank was firmly
established as a collector. In the
fall 1969 he bought a group of Arctic voyages from the English dealer Frank
Hammond, acquired more American travels at the stock dispersal sale of the
New York
dealer Peter Decker, and
began to buy more broadly. Most
importantly, he established a relationship with the dealer Kenneth Nebenzahl,
whom he had met at one of the second Streeter sale session.
Based in
Chicago
, Ken had become one of the
leading dealers in
Americana
and especially American
cartography, and was a major factor in the entire sale.
Frank and Ken quickly formed a warm rapport which broadened into a
lifelong friendship, and Ken became Frank’s principal dealer for most of his
career. Unlike the dealers closely
associated with his father, Ken was younger than Frank by more than a decade,
a step toward finding his own style of collecting rather than his father’s.
Perhaps as a result of Ken’s influence, Frank’s interest in
cartography broadened, and he acquired such atlases as Bellin’s Le
Petit Atlas Maritime… (
Paris
, 1764) (FSS sale 32) and Jefferys’ The
American Atlas… (
London
, 1778) (FSS sale 284).
1970 brought widespread recognition of Frank’s seriousness
as a collector, no doubt aided by being the son of Thomas W.
Streeter. In that year he
was elected to the nation’s leading association of book collectors, New
York’s Grolier Club, in which he was active for the rest of his life, and
President of from 1982-85. He was
also elected to the Walpole Society, from which so many happy associations in
his life sprang (his brother Henry was elected in 1974).
In the spring of 1971 he was elected to the American Antiquarian
Society, and within a few years he became active in support of, and later on
the boards of, the John Carter Brown Library and the New-York Historical
Society.
In 1971 the
Philadelphia
collector Boies Penrose
decided to sell his remarkable collection of early travel and exploration
books at auction in
London
.
Penrose had been a devoted collector in the field for decades, and had
taken advantage of great buying opportunities in the 1920s and ‘30s.
He was also a noted scholar of early voyages, and wrote several books
that remain the most readable and useful surveys of the field for
collector-historians. (Note 7, See
particularly his Travel And Discovery In
The Renaissance [
Cambridge
, 1952].
For Penrose, see Donald Dickinson, ed., Dictionary
Of American Book Collectors [
New York
, 1986], pp.
256-57, and Grolier 2000 A Further Grolier Club Biographical Retrospective [
New York
, 2000], pp.284-286.) The
Penrose collection was rich in 16th century narratives, as well as
early works on navigation and seamanship.
For the most part Penrose’s holdings were outside the scope of the
kinds of books Thomas W. Streeter
collected, and Frank’s vigorous participation, both in nature and volume, in
the sale marked his full evolution as a collector in his own right outside of
fields already trod by his father.
Ultimately Frank’s library contained twenty of the 366
books offered at Penrose. (Note 8,
See FSS sale 49, 133, 198, 260, 280, 322, 327, 335, 249, 381, 391, 428,
433, 465, 471, 474, 483, 491, 515, 532). Some
of these were bought from Nebenzahl after the fact, but most, including all of
the important ones, were bought with Ken bidding as his agent at the sale
itself. The first book up was the
most important, Peter Martyr, The
Decades Of The New Worlde Or
West India
… (
London
, 1555), the first English
language collection of voyage narratives, translated from the works of the
Spanish court official and official historian of the
Indies
by Richard Eden.
The Penrose copy was a superb example in contemporary binding,
originally belonging to one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship captains, Roger
North. It proved to be the second
most expensive item in the Penrose sale, and would be the third most expensive
in Frank’s – a solid pillar to build around (Penrose sale 10, $15,600, FSS
sale 349, $768,000 to Reese). Non-American
material took a large step forward with the purchase of Pedro Quiros, Terra
Australis Incognita… (
London
, 1617), one of the earliest
descriptions of any part of
Australia
(Penrose sale 82, $4560, FSS
sale 428, $84,000 to Reese).
Northwest
Passage
material was enhanced with
Thomas James, The Strange And Dangerous
Voyage Of Captaine Thomas James… (
London
, 1633), one of the first
serious probes of
Hudson
’s Bay (Penrose sale 280, $3600, FSS sale 280, $102,000 to
Lan). A step toward purely
cosmographical material was made with Robert Recorde, The Castle Of Knowledge (
London
, 1556), the earliest major
English astronomical treatise (Penrose sale 351, $3600, FSS sale 433, $90,000
to a phone bidder). Another
non-American addition was the first English edition of the narrative of a
landmark early Dutch voyage to the South Pacific, and the first to round
Cape Horn
rather than sailing through
the Straits of Magellan, Willem Schouten, The
Relation Of A Wonderfull Voiage… (
London
, 1619) (Penrose sale 217,
$2880, FSS sale $168,000 to Reese). All
of the Penrose purchases added significant and important works which seldom
appeared on the market. In the
final result of Frank’s sale about one-eighth of its entire value was
realized out of the twenty Penrose books.
The period from 1970 to 1975 marked the height of Frank’s
collecting. In 1972 and 1974
respectively he purchased the Samuel Champlain’s Voyages… (
Paris
, 1619) (FSS sale 100) and the same author’s
collected Les Voyages… (
Paris
, 1632) (FSS sale 101).
From Nebenzahl in 1972 he bought a magnificent set the five volumes of
Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, (
London
, 1625-26), the most
extensive early English collection of voyages, in a stunning contemporary
morocco binding. It was certainly
one of the most beautiful books in Frank’s collection.
The second edition of the Eden translation, now titled The
History Of Travayle In The West And East Indies (London, 1577) (FSS sale
350), was bought from the firm of Lathrop Harper, as well as the copy of the
English edition of Juan Gonzales de Mendoza, The Historie Of The Great And Mightie Kingdome Of China… (
London
, 1588), which had belonged
to the great English sailor Thomas Cavendish.
This provoked one of the epic bidding wars at Frank’s sale (FSS sale
lot 232, the phone vs. Block, the
latter winning at $216,000 on a pre-sale estimate of $12,000-$18,000).
A steady flow of acquisitions added to the collection regularly in this
period.
In 1974 another sale loomed.
Harrison D. Horblit, a
Harvard man from slightly before Frank’s era, was another collector whose
love of the sea had first led him into collecting maritime and navigational
books. By the 1970s his interests
had expanded broadly, and he had become one of the pioneer collectors of the
history of science and of photography (Note 7, See Grolier
2000…, pp.153-156). He
decided to sell some of his navigational books at Sotheby’s in
London
, and the first two sessions,
alphabetically arranged through the letter “G”, took place in June and
November, 1974. On this occasion
Frank bid through Nebenzahl and the Anglo-American dealer Franklin
Brooke-Hitching, who had worked for Nebenzahl before moving to
England
.
He ultimately took home seventeen lots from a strongly contested sale.
One of the stars of the sale was Horblit’s copy of Sir Robert Dudley,
Arcano Del Mare (
Florence
, 1661). Produced
by an exiled Englishman, it is generally considered the first world maritime
atlas with charts on the Mercator projection, a magnificent work with hundreds
of engraved maps and illustrations in two large folio bindings.
The Horblit copy was a magnificent example, bound in contemporary
gilt-stamped vellum, and a gorgeous thing to behold.
Frank had to bid strongly to get it, but in the end it was the most
expensive single lot at his sale (Horblit sale 323, $22,800, FSS sale 166,
$824,000 to Block). Hardly less
wonderful than this was the earliest navigational guide with major references
to the navigation of the
New World
, Martin Fernandez de Encisco,
Suma De Geographica… (
Seville
, 1519), a beautiful copy
bound in 17th century mottled Spanish calf.
Few books so epitomize the excitement of the opening up of the
navigation of the world, the titlepage decorated with an outstretched hand
grasping an astrolabe (Horblit sale 369, $10,800, FSS sale 178, $288,000 to
Reese). Frank took an important
step toward more theoretical works the second edition of Nicholas Copernicus, De
Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium… (
Basle
, 1566), a beautiful copy in
contemporary vellum which had belonged to the first professor of geometry at
Oxford
, Henry Briggs (Horblit sale
241, $17,850, FSS sale 241, $180,000 to Massey).
Another important 16th century English work on navigation
was Martin Cortes, The Arte Of
Navigation… (
London
, 1572), with its striking
map of the
Atlantic
(Horblit sale 247, $6240,
FSS sale 126, $120,000 to Massey).
The two sessions of the Horblit sale were possibly Frank’s
finest hour as a book collector, as he reached high against strong competition
for some very important books, and spent more money (judged against the market
and inflation) than he did on any other occasion.
There is no telling what might have happened if the Horblit sales had
continued, but Horblit, who felt his books should have done better (they did
very well for the time) and who didn’t need the money in any event (it was
widely felt he put the sale on simply to demonstrate what an astute collector
he had been) decided not to sell any more after the letter “G”.
Some of the books later came on the market through H.P.
Kraus, but most of the important ones were ultimately given to Harvard,
a result Frank would not have quarreled with in any event.
As with the Penrose books, the Horblit group was a significant part of
Frank’s final sale, also realizing about an eighth of the final result.
(Note 9 Students of comparative valuation will be interested in the
statistics of the three primary sales which contributed to the building of
Frank’s collection. The
books from the TWS sale of 1966-69 realized 22.12 times as much at the FSS
sale. However, if one excludes The Atlantic Neptune,
which distorts the sample by its size, and which he bought long after the
fact, the ratio is 26.29 times. The
books from the Penrose sale of 1971 did best, realizing 29.31 times.
The Horblit sale of 1974 realized 17.87 times as much in the FSS sale.)
As the collection progressed and deepened, Frank expanded on
the various themes which intrigued him. Although
travels with the United States were never a major interest, he did acquire the
basic triumvirate of early western explorations within the Louisiana Purchase,
those by Zebulon Pike, Edwin James on the Long Expedition, and Lewis and Clark
(FSS sale 427, 279, 325). The
last, a beautiful copy in contemporary tree calf, equaled his father’s in
auction performance; Thomas Streeter’s copy in original boards set a
long-standing record by selling for $35,000 in 1967, while Frank’s set a new
record for the book in calf at $288,000 (to a phone bidder).
He also bought a number of classic works of travel in the American
West, particularly
California
, which had a Pacific tinge.
In Pacific voyages he extended his interest into the 19th
century, adding a number of the great French Grand
Voyages such as Duflot de Mofras, Duhaut-Cilly, Dumont D’Urville, and
Duperrey (FSS sale 167, 170, 171, 172, and 173).
His interest in the technical aspects of navigation continued to grow,
such as the struggle of John Harrison to find an accurate method of
determining longitude. Over time
Frank built a fine group of material on
Harrison
(FSS sale 251-256).
Atlases were added from time to time, such as the wonderful collection
of Spanish navigational charts by Vincente Tofino de San Miguel he bought from
Nebenzahl, which provoked strong competition at the sale (FSS sale 501,
$120,000 to Arader). Canadian
material early and late with some bearing on the
Northwest Passage
continued to be added,
extended into the 19th century to include some of the many
publications relating to the final expedition of Sir John Franklin and the
numerous searchers trying to discover his fate.
A few travels to other parts of the world were added as well.
Around 1980, Frank began to seriously develop the more
strictly scientific part of his collection.
He already possessed numerous important early practical navigation
works and some of a more theoretical nature.
There were two probable catalysts for this expanding interest.
The first was the sale of the Robert Honeyman collection in
London
.
A mining engineer and graduate of
Lehigh
University
, Honeyman formed a
pioneering assemblage of works on science and the applied engineering arts, as
well as important collections of literature and
Darwin
which he left to Lehigh.
The sale began in 1978, but Frank’s lack of participation in the
earlier sessions and participation in the 1980 sales (the sale was
alphabetical) suggests a definite awakening about this time.
Here he acquired the first of several important volumes by Johannes
Kepler, Tabulae Rudolphinae… (
Ulm
, 1627) (Honeyman sale 1802,
FSS sale 297, $120,000 to Massey). Linked
to the Honeyman sale was the beginning of a warm association with Jonathan
Hill, then emerging as the leading American dealer in the history of science
and the son of the collector Kenneth Hill, another collector of Pacific Voyage
books (Note 9, Ken Hill gave his collection to the University of California at
San Diego in 1974 It is recorded in detail in a revised second edition of The
Hill Collection Of Pacific Voyages… [New Haven, William Reese Company,
2004]). Jonathan assumed the role
as dealer in the more theoretical science books which Nebenzahl filled in
travel. Frank was increasingly
interested in this sort of book, and they became his predominant focus,
especially after Nebenzahl retired from active business in the late 1980s.
While he bought books from various sources over the years,
Frank generally preferred to acquire books from his favorite dealers, or to
have them bid for him at auction or vet books he became aware of in other
dealer’s stocks. Initially this
had been Nebenzahl and Brooke-Hitching, then Hill in science.
As the 1980s went on, he also dealt with Helen Kahn in
Montreal
for Canadian and
Arctic
books, and myself in
New Haven
for
Americana
(I frequently saw Frank in
New York
at the Grolier Club, and
served on its Council with him while he was President).
Frank usually attended the New York Book Fair, and I often ran into him
at
New York
auctions as an observer. He
savored these buying and selling events as I think he liked all book events,
because he enjoyed the people who collected books and sold books, and because
he liked to watch the market and the players in it.
How much he would have enjoyed his own sale, had he lived to see it!
In 1993, Frank acquired one of the major landmarks of his
collection, his father’s copy of The
Atlantic Neptune. This
remarkable coastal atlas, under the administration of Joseph F.W.
Des Barres, was sponsored by the Admiralty with the intention of
mapping in precise detail the entire coastline of North America from
Newfoundland to the mouth of the Mississippi.
Beginning publication in 1774, it never completed its southern end, but
produced many stunning charts, enlivened with vignettes of towns and places
inset in the maps. Because the
plates were constantly revised, and because copies would be made up to fill
individual ships’ needs, no two sets are alike.
The Streeter copy, bound for use on board a ship, is particularly
beautiful in its coloring and condition. At
the Thomas Streeter sale it was the third most expensive item, selling via
Sessler to Walpolean Richard Dietrich. When
Dick parted with the set at Christie’s in 1993, I bought it, and shortly
thereafter sold it to Frank. It
was both a pillar of his atlas collection and of the books he owned from his
father’s library. In the event
it was the second most expensive book at his sale (FSS sale 148, $779,200 to
Massey).
The purchase of the Neptune
was, I think, another turning point for Frank as a collector.
He was seventy-five and at the point of finally retiring from active
business. He owned many wonderful
books, and the evolution of prices had reached a point where the new
valuations were many times what he had paid for much of his collection.
Acquisitions became less frequent and more considered, aiming at
filling gaps he had long intended to buy rather than striking out into new
territory. Books continued to come
in, but at a far slower pace. Indeed,
Frank never stopped collecting, buying books up to the last year of his life,
even after he had essentially taken the decision to part with the collection
in his lifetime. When he decided
to sell, he had two important reasons. First,
he did not want the disposition of the collection to be a burden on his family
and wanted to resolve it while he was present to organize it.
Secondly, he wanted to be present at the event.
With Nebenzahl and Hill as his agents, he worked out all of the details
of the sale exactly as he wanted it, including the date, and took part in
discussions with the auction houses. Ultimately
it was determined to auction the books via Christie’s.
Alas, on the very day the collection was picked up by the auction
house, he died after a brief illness.
The sale was set for April 16-17, 2007, the two days prior to
the New York Book Fair, when many of the major dealers and collectors would
already be in New York. Christie’s
did an exemplary job of preparing the catalogue, in two stout volumes, which
provide superb documentation of the books Frank collected.
In the modern mode of auction catalogue they describe the physical
appearance of the books and the nature of their contents in exhaustive detail.
Unlike the Thomas Streeter sale or other more recent major Americana
sales, which were arranged topically, it was decided to use a strictly
alphabetical order. The 552 lots
were sold in three sessions, the first on the evening of the 16th,
and the second and third during the day of the 17th.
The pre-sale buzz, not surprisingly, was quite strong.
Frank’s collection was the most important of its kind since the Frank
Siebert sale in 1999, and no copies of some of the books had been seen on the
market since he bought them in the 1970s.
There had also been an interesting warm-up for the sale at Sotheby’s
London in March, when the travel section of the library of the Earls of
Macclesfield had been sold. The
Macclesfield session had contained twenty books which also appeared in
Frank’s collection, including a Dudley atlas, a set of Purchas, and a copy
of the English Gonzalez de Mendoza. This
sale, despite condition issues on some of the books, was remarkably strong.
Most of the same players would reassemble in New York the next month,
and the prices paid in March made some of the Streeter estimates look
laughably low.
Modern sale rooms cannot match the romance, or the
information gathering potential, of the auctions of yesteryear.
At the time of the Thomas Streeter sale the bidders had no choice but
to assemble in one room and be seen, unless they bid through an agent.
It was thus relatively easy to track the buyers – in fact the
auctioneer generally called out the names of well-known dealers.
London houses went even further and published the names of the buyers
in the auction results. Most
bidding was through dealers. Modern
auctions are not inclined to provide free advertising to dealers, and only the
bidder’s paddle number is announced. Nonetheless,
an informed observer can quickly see who is attached to a paddle in the room,
and may well fathom which dealer represents a certain collector.
The prevalence of telephone bidding, and now internet bidding, makes it
far more difficult to understand who the unseen buyers are, and private
bidders often stay anonymous by staying out of the sale room.
Some sales end up with a handful of participants in the room and most
of the action on the phone.
In this regard Frank’s sale was at least a partial return
to old times; it was dominated by dealers, largely bidding for clients, and
for the most part actually present in the sale room.
This made it far more observable as it evolved into the slugging match
it became. Perhaps a hundred
people were present on the opening evening, including most of the leading
dealers in the field and a number of well-known collectors, as well as members
of the Streeter family and a number of Grolier Club friends such as Helmut
Friedlaender (who, though over 90, was a consistent bidder).
After several small opening lots, lot 3, Thomas Addison, Arithmeticall
Navigation… (London, 1625), set the tone for what was to follow.
The first English book to explain navigational problems by logarithmic
tables, Frank had purchased it at the Horblit sale, and no copy had appeared
since; it soared past the estimate (Horblit sale 13, $11520, FSS sale 3,
$78,000 to Harrington). Through
the vagaries of the alphabet the opening session contained far fewer major
books then the next day, but when
the 1619 and 1632 Champlain volumes both set records, the strength of the sale
was clear (FSS sale 100, $84,000 to Sourget, and 101, $264,000 to Block).
The capstone of the evening was The
Atlantic Neptune, which Christie’s had carefully planned to be almost
the final lot of the evening. Everybody
went home with much to reflect on.
The next morning the second session opened with a rousing run
through the Dobbs-Middleton pamphlets, all selling for four to six times the
high estimate, followed by an epic duel over the Horblit copy of Dudley, which
sold for twice what the Macclesfield copy had brought the previous month.
With the Horblit Enciso shortly after this, the sale achieved a
momentum it never lost, and even quite regular books began to achieve record
prices, in some cases going for multiples of the asking price of better copies
offered on-line. These minor books
aside, most of the major rarities achieved spectacular prices.
When the first edition of Richard Hakluyt, The
Principall Navigations… (London, 1589), a book which had never
approached six figures at auction, sold for eight times the estimate, even the
hardened veterans gasped (FSS sale 243,
Reese vs. Lan and sold to the latter for $456,000).
The run of pamphlets on John Harrison and the chronometer closed out
the morning with a breathtaking run, one rare pamphlet clearly undervalued at
its $3000/4000 estimate selling for $96,000 (FSS sale 251, to Block).
After a lunch break in which further adjustment of thinking
occurred, action resumed with Frank’s run of works of Kepler, then soared
with Mark Lescarbot, Nova Francia…
(London, 1609), the first English edition of the classic accounts of New
France (FSS sale lot 322, $144,000 to Reese) and the Lewis and Clark.
With all of the Pacific voyages performing very solidly, perhaps the
most exciting moment of the sale came with the 1555 Martyr from Penrose,
generally considered by the cognoscenti to be the best book in Frank’s
collection. After a long duel
between Quaritch and Reese the latter finally prevailed, although Quaritch
later won a similar round against Reese over the beautiful set of Purchas (FSS
sale 426, $576,000 to Quaritch). The
final major book, appropriately, was Frank’s beloved copy of Warre.
It, too, set an auction record (FSS sale lot 524, $192,000 to a phone
bidder).
The Duke of Wellington famously said that the history of a
battle was like the history of a ball, because each participant came away with
a unique set of impressions depending on where they had been while it went on.
The same is certainly true of auctions, and the more one knows of the
material being sold and the persons bidding, the more complex those
impressions become. It is
impossible to convey, in less than an entire book, the thickness of
information (to borrow a phrase from modern anthropology) available to the
trained observer, and I necessarily abbreviate my saleroom notes.
One did not need any training, however, to see that the sale of
Frank’s books was a runaway success. The
final total was $16,421,820, with all but eight minor lots sold.
The only thing missing was Frank himself.
It was an epic conclusion to a collecting career, one that brought him
infinite pleasure in friends, books, and associations.
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