The Grail of American Rare Books

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The New York Sun

At the conclusion of Christie’s sale of fine printed books and manuscripts this afternoon, a single volume will be offered for $5 million to $7 million.It is a double-elephant folio of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America,” the grail of American rare books. Approximately 120 complete copies of the original edition are known to exist. One of them, known as the Fox-Bute copy, was sold at Christie’s in 2000 to a private buyer for $8.8 million, setting the record for any printed book at auction.


This particular Audubon folio comes with some baggage, however.The seller is the Providence Athenaeum, a 252-year-old membership library.When the library first sought to auction the folio in 2003 to raise money for a dwindling endowment, a group of members sued Christie’s and the Athenaeum’s board of directors, claiming that the board was unlawfully elected, that the consignment was illegal, and that the board had behaved in a “wanton manner.” Last summer, the Supreme Court of Rhode Island dismissed the plaintiff’s appeal of a lower-court judgment in favor of the board and Christie’s, finally allowing the sale to proceed.


“Since then there seems to have been a real change in the climate, and this is the concluding piece,” the Providence Athenaeum’s executive director, Alison Maxell, said. “Some members that were concerned have since returned to the Athenaeum.”


The Athenaeum ordered its copy from Audubon in 1832 in loose sheets. “They prepared it for exhibition,” the head of Christie’s department of printed books and manuscripts, Francis Wahlgren, said. “I think it definitely lends itself to an institution, and it would be a great conclusion to see it end up in an institution.”


Audubon’s great innovation was to capture the birds in such lifelike poses that they seemed possessed of formidable character. The great naturalist achieved this in part by first killing the birds and then mounting them on elaborate wire constructions.


During the late 1820s, as his life-size renderings of chattering Carolina parrots and brutish blue jays were first being etched on copper plates, Audubon was busy running around Europe and America, signing up subscribers for his birds. Because the large folios were so expensive to produce,Audubon personally pre-sold subscriptions for around $1,000, for either four bound volumes or loose sheets.


The 435 hand-painted engravings on sale at Christie’s were based on Audubon’s paintings of barn owls, bald eagles, woodpeckers, wood ducks, and other North American species. They were executed by London engraver R. Havell and Sons under Audubon’s supervision. The “double-elephant” broadsheets are 29 1/2 inches by 39 1/2 inches, untrimmed. “It was a highly unusual format because it would have been extremely costly,” Mr. Wahlgren said. “I can only think of several books of that format up to that date.”


Audubon had first contracted W.H. Lizars in Edinburgh to do the engraving, but he became dissatisfied with the pace of the work after strikes by Lizars’s colorists. He then moved on the Havells, whose work he was more satisfied with anyway. It took 12 years, from 1826 to 1838, to produce all 435 plates based on Audubon’s original watercolors.Most of the paintings are now at the New-York Historical Society.


Each copy of the folio is itself a work of art with distinct coloring and shading. The coloring of the Athenaeum copy is very good, according to an Audubon expert and rare-book dealer, Donald Heald. “But the overall condition is as a book not as good as some of the copies that have been sold recently,” Mr. Heald said. “I would personally prefer to have it as a book in original binding, but different people have different approaches.”


The Fox-Bute copy, according to the director of special collections at the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library, Patrick Scott, was bound and in “perfect condition.”


“The big variation is in terms of condition,” said Mr. Scott, whose library was one of the original “Birds” subscribers.”By and large, the more prominent the institution where it’s been, the more likely there’s been wear and use.” In 1992, the University of Edinburgh sold a complete Audubon folio at Christie’s for $4.07 million.


The initial controversy over the Athenaeum sale came at a time when institutions auctioning off important works of art were coming under greater public scrutiny. Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art all sold Impressionist and Modern works at auction, with the stated purpose of raising money for acquisitions funds. Last month at Sotheby’s, the New York Public Library sold 16 paintings and sculptures, including a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, earning $15.6 million for the library’s endowment.


“It’s not wicked for a small institution like the Providence Athenaeum to consider what its assets are,” Mr. Scott said.”The problem for it is that its identity as a private institution rests on people’s sense of ownership in the institution, and it’s selling off part of its identity.” The University of South Carolina Library, Mr. Scott said, has received donations of an Audubon letter and 18thcentury American natural history watercolors due to the fact that it already owns a double-elephant folio of “Birds of America.”


The Athenaeum does not necessarily see its primary mission as one of scholarly collection and preservation, however. “We’re an actual circulating library,” Ms. Maxell said. “We became [known for] rare books by accident because we’re so old.” At the end of the day, Providence will not be bereft of a complete Audubon, since another copy exists at Brown University.


The New York Sun

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