Sotheby’s to Offer the James S. Copley Library Sotheby’s to Offer the James S. Copley Library A Remarkable Trove of Original Manuscripts of American History, Worldwide Literary, Artistic and Scientific Achievement
*An archive of letters sent by General Eisenhower to his wife from the battlefields of Europe (est.
$400/600,000)
* A listing by Father Junipero Serra on March 1, 1777 of all of the missions he founded in Alta California (est.
$250/350,000)
*One of the earliest surviving maps of the Port of San Diego, surveyed and drawn by Juan Pantoja u Arriaga in
September 1782 (est. $300/500,000)
Arts & Sciences including The Mark Twain Collection
Always a voracious reader, Mr. Copley’s manuscript collecting made him realize he could also obtain first editions as well as original letters of his favorite authors - principal among them is his fellow California newspaper man, Mark Twain. The Mark Twain Collection is rich in letters, both to Twain’s publishers and family and friends. A number of manuscripts relate to some of his more famous publications and the collection also includes an unpublished autobiographical manuscript entitled A Family Sketch. Other literary and artistic luminaries featured in the collection include Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, James Joyce, George Gershwin, Julia Ward Howe, and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, among many others. Achievements in science and the minds behind them also fascinated Mr. Copley, and among the offerings from the Library is a significant group of letters and two speeches by Albert Einstein. Other noteworthy names acquired by Mr. Copley include Sir Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, Charles
Darwin, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
Highlights to be offered include:
*Walt Whitman writing his mother in 1864 about Grant, Lee and the Battle of the Wilderness (est.
$18/25,000)
*Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ unpublished manuscript, “A Family Sketch”; his most intimate and introspective
memoir of his family and his own boyhood days (est. $120/160,000)
*A chapter from John James Audubon’s “Ornithological biography” entitled ‘The Ohio’ in which he recalls
vividly his voyage down the Ohio River from Pennsylvania to Kentucky (est. $10/15,000)
*Albert Einstein’s autograph speech delivered to the California Institute Associates on 25 January 1932 (est.
$40/60,000)
*Charlotte Brontë writing to W.S. Williams, her agent or publisher, on 18 October 1848 and expressing a
pessimistic outlook on the study of human motivations (est. $35/50,000)
*Pages from the first chapter of Louisa May Alcott’s “Jack and Jill”, most likely written during the summer of
1880 (est. $5/7,000)
*Twenty-six bars of George Gershwin’s song, “Clap Yo’ Hands”, dated November 1926 (est. $8/12,000)
*Emily Dickinson writing in the spring of 1871 to Mrs. Henry Hills, a friend and neighbor from New York, on the
subject of love and charity (est. $35/50,000)
Elizabeth von Habsburg, President of Gurr Johns, Inc, the agent for the Library in the sale, commented, “There was a great wish to share the Library with a broader audience. Up until now, there has been public access to the Library, and scholarly research has been undertaken for several years. But through the exhibitions, catalogues and interest created by the upcoming auctions, the collection will
