The Streeter Sale Revisited, Fifty Years Later
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CATALOGUE THREE HUNDRED FORTY-SEVEN The Streeter Sale Revisited, Fifty Years Later WILLIAM REESE COMPANY 409 Temple Street New Haven, CT 06511 (203) 789-8081 Available on request or via our website are our recent catalogues 341 Colonial Americana, 342 Latin Americana, 343 Recent Acquisitions in Americana, 345 The American Revolution, 346 Western Americana; bulletins 44 Photography, 45 Natural History, 46 Manuscripts, and 48 American Scenes and Views; e-lists (only available on our website) and many more topical lists. q A portion of our stock may be viewed at www.williamreesecompany.com. If you would like to receive e-mail notification when catalogues and lists are uploaded, please e-mail us at [email protected] or send us a fax, specifying whether you would like to receive the notifications in lieu of or in addition to paper catalogues. If you would prefer not to receive future catalogues and/or notifications, please let us know. Terms Material herein is offered subject to prior sale. All items are as described and are considered to be on approval. Notice of return must be given within ten days unless specific arrange- ments are made. Connecticut residents must be billed state sales tax. Postage and insurance charges are billed to all nonprepaid domestic orders. Overseas orders are sent by air unless otherwise requested, with full postage charges billed at our discretion. Payment by check, wire transfer, or bank draft is preferred, but may also be made by MasterCard or Visa. William Reese Company Phone: (203) 789-8081 409 Temple Street Fax: (203) 865-7653 New Haven, CT 06511 E-mail: [email protected] www.williamreesecompany.com ON THE COVER: 71. [Francis, Charles Spencer]: Sport Among the Rockies.... Troy, N.Y. 1889. PREFACE Thomas W. Streeter (1883-1965) was the foremost collector of Americana in the 20th century. A successful lawyer and businessman, Streeter began to collect actively after the First World War, and continued with unabated energy almost until his death. Within the broad scope of Americana, his interests were diverse. His collection of Texana, the basis for his magisterial bibliography on that subject to 1845, was the finest ever formed. It was sold en bloc to Yale University. His equally comprehensive collection of early American transportation material, especially railroads, was given to various institutions in appropriate regional subdivisions. He retained his main collection, which covered North America from earliest discovery to the close of the frontier in Alaska, with an emphasis on what he called “Americana Beginnings.” Streeter planned that his books would be dispersed at auction after his death. He was well aware that, given the scope and fame of his collection, the sale would be a major event in the world of Americana. He also knew that the catalogue, if properly produced, would be a useful reference tool and a monument to his achievement, and would ensure his lasting fame. Although it was a posthumous event, Streeter’s hand is evident throughout the auction and its catalogue. He took considerable pleasure in plotting the event, and the arrangements he made bore the fruit he expected. The books included in the Streeter sale represent only a portion – albeit the best portion – of his library. The items to be included were selected after his death by the booksellers who were the leading experts in printed Americana at the time: Michael Walsh of Goodspeed’s in Boston; Roland Tree of Henry Stevens, Stiles, then of New York and London; and Lindley and Charles Eberstadt of Edward Eberstadt & Sons in New York. All were to play an important part in the subsequent sale, as well. After they selected 4,421 individual items for the auction, the remaining books were sold privately to Goodspeed’s and the Eberstadts. These included most of his reference library and some books that would merit individual treatment today. At the same time, in the interest of displaying the range of the collection, some items were included in the auction sale which were not of great monetary value. Parke-Bernet Galleries, then the leading auction house in New York, was the obvi- ous – indeed, the only possible – venue. The production of the catalogue was aided greatly by Streeter’s detailed notes and collations, either those contained in a series of loose-leaf binders (now at the American Antiquarian Society), or those boldly written with a very sharp pencil in the books themselves in the collector’s easily recognizable, fine hand. These notes provide the bulk of the commentary in the catalogue itself. The size of the project, the care needed in cataloguing, and a fear of overburdening the market, all suggested that the sale should be held over an extended period of time. In the end, the catalogue comprised seven volumes, and the sale was held in twenty- one sessions over three years, commencing in October 1966 and ending in October 1969. The sessions were arranged in categories assigned by Streeter. The sale began with French and Spanish ventures in the New World, then followed the English fron- tier westward from Plymouth to Alaska, and concluded with Canadiana, pocket maps, reference works, and a few titles of social, economic, or literary significance. Within individual sections, book were arranged chronologically. Streeter influenced the sale well beyond his contribution to its catalogue. First, his fame as a collector naturally added fuel to the interest the books would have ordinarily attracted. He had been widely active in the world of rare books and rare book librar- ies, and his friends in those areas were legion. He was equally well liked in the trade. Second, he had provided benefactions to a number of institutions out of the proceeds from the sale. Eighteen institutions received bequests totaling $400,000 to be used exclusively for book purchases at the sale. This had the effect of increasing competition in a number of lots, especially since many of the institutions used the Streeter gifts to raise matching funds for purchases. The prices realized at the Streeter sale remade the price structure of printed Ameri- cana and have served as a baseline ever since. At the time, they seemed staggering to many, who interpreted them as the result of hype and foolishness. Although some prices were staggering, not all were by any means, and when all of the prices are aver- aged, I think they accurately portray full retail figures at the time. The overall results were dramatic – a final sum of $3,104,892, the highest dollar total ever realized by any sale of printed books in the United States up to that time. The individual high prices were eagerly seized on by the trade, who took to offering books with the “Streeter copy fetched x, and my copy is only y” tactic, since of course it was the individual big lots which everyone remembered best. In 1970, when the index volume to the sale came out, the Americana world was divided as to whether it was the beginning of a Brave New World or an epic bender on the scale of the notorious Kern sale of 1929. This is the third catalogue of the William Reese Company to take a backward glance at the Streeter sale. Our first, catalogue 128, was issued in 1993 to commemorate, more or less, the 25th anniversary of the sale and look at the comparative rise of prices over that period. Our second, catalogue 257, came out in 2007, in the wake of the Frank S. Streeter sale. That event, the biggest auction of its kind since his father’s sale, provided excellent price comparisons, especially since Frank held some forty-two books which had also been in the Thomas Streeter sale. The present catalogue, issued twenty-four years after our Catalogue 128, approximates the 50th anniversary of the auction, which had proceeded through the first two volumes of the sale by late 1967. For me personally, the Streeter Sale has long been the yardstick against which I measured much of what I saw and did in the world of rare Americana. I am just young enough not to have attended any of the sales, but one of the first reference works I acquired was a set of the catalogues, with the recently published index, in 1971. My set was partially annotated by an attendee – I have never been able to figure out who – and it immediately gave me the idea of filling out the information on buyers, own- ers, and where the lots had gone as I could acquire it. As I came to know many of the booksellers and curators who had been key players in the auction, I copied their annotations into my set. I also began to note whenever I saw a Streeter copy reappear for sale, or discovered one in a final institutional resting place. My forty-five years of annotations inform the notes at the end of each entry in the present catalogue, giving what I know of the history of the Streeter copy. The Reese Company currently has in stock over 450 titles of which copies appeared at the Streeter Sale, or more than 10% of the auction’s total. Since listing them all would make for too bulky a catalogue, I have picked about half of those to make up the present listing. Of the titles offered here, I can trace the provenance of the Streeter copies for approximately 85%. The remainder went either to order bids or to buyers whom I have never identified. For the great majority, I know at least who the original buyer was, and often a good deal more of the history of the copy.