Valuable Books and Manuscripts

Christie’s London sale of Valuable Books and Manuscripts is equally strong on visual delights and documents of turning points in human history. Science and intellectual history are represented by corrected proofs by Charles Darwin for a work on insectivorous plants, an autograph letter by Karl Marx to his French publisher, a 13th-century manuscript of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, and books and autographs by Einstein, Descartes, Huygens, Galileo, Kepler and Brahe. Artistic highlights include a series of lavishly-illustrated Books of Hours alongside decorated codices from Ethiopia, Armenia and Siam, and illuminated leaves from the collection of Alfred and Felicie Scharf; the illustrated printed books range from Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s depictions of Empress Josephine’s gardens at Malmaison, published by Étienne-Pierre Ventenat in 1803, to Marc Chagall’s illustrations for Homer’s Odyssey, printed in 1975. Crossing the boundary between science and visual appeal are a number of important lots of cartography, including atlases by Ortelius, Mercator, Janssonius and Braun and Hogenberg, as well as a fine example of an extremely rare Chinese wall-map of the world, Complete Map of the Everlasting Great Qing with All under Heaven Unified, published in Beijing in 1814.

Explore the rest of the Classic Week auction series.