SAN FRANCISCO – A superb reprinting from the original copper plates of The North American Indian highlights PBA Galleries’ Rare Americana & Travel with Books & Maps from the Warrant Heckrotte Collection Sale on July 28. The sale will include nearly 550 lots of rare, interesting and important material relating to the history, culture and development of the Americas and the world at large.
Absentee and Internet live bidding will be available through LiveAuctioneers.com.
Included are books, maps, photographs, manuscripts and ephemera, plus a selection of directories of various states and cities of the United States. There are also sections of books and maps from the fine collection formed by Warren Heckrotte, adding to the rarities previously sold in a series of four auctions dedicated exclusively to his material.
The North American Indian: The Southwest includes text and a selection of plates (above) which are abridged from Volumes, 1, 2, 12, 16, & 17 of Edward Curtis’s famed 20-volume magnum opus The North American Indian. The publisher of this edition, The Classic Gravure Corp., was established to purchase the original 2,220 copper plates and reproduce the work in an edition similar to the original. In three volumes, the foreword is written by Theodore Roosevelt and contains 36 large and 75 small gravure plates from Curtis’s photographs (Estimate: 15,000/$20,000).
Also on offer is A New Map of Texas, Oregon and California, with the Regions Adjoining, the seminal 1846 pocket map (below) by Samuel Augustus Mitchell, finely matted and framed with the original folder and text present. This important map dates from a time of geographic discovery as well as political upheaval and change – Texas had been recently annexed and California, recently declared independent from Mexico but attracting much attention in the United States (Estimate: $10,000/$15,000).
The spectacular 1859 lithographed bird’s-eye View of that portion of the City of San Francisco seen from the residence of H. Larco, Esq., Green Street Telegraph Hill looking south, was printed by Kuchel and Dresel from the painting by the German expatriate Eugene Camerer. The handsome wood frame was custom made for the lithograph (below) by Aedicule of San Francisco (Estimate: $7,000/$10,000).
Other featured items include: a rare and revealing photographic album with 48 original photographs of mining activities in northern China and transport there on the Tran-Siberian Railroad and through Manchuria, c. 1900 (Estimate: $2,500/$3,500); the rare 1875 folding pocket Map of Virginia City and Comstock Lode, State of Nevada, the most significant sources of precious metals in America (Estimate: $4,000/$6,000); and a complete set of the quarto edition of the Pacific Railroad Reports with hundreds of lithographed and engraved plates of the land, people, fauna and flora of the American West plus important maps (Estimate: $4,000/$6,000).
The sale will begin at 11 a.m. Pacific time. For more information, contact PBA at 415-989-2665 or pba@pbagalleries.com.
