Sotheby’s will offer Highly Important Printed and Manuscript Americana across three live sessions in New York on 13 and 14 April 2021, the final auctions dedicated to the collection of the late American businessman and philanthropist Ira A. Lipman and his wife Barbara K. Lipman. The collection comprises more than 500 primary records spanning over 300 years of American history, including letters, documents, books, broadsides, maps, atlases, pamphlets and newspapers, with figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln represented throughout. The full collection is on public view by appointment at Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries from 8 to 12 April.
Ira Lipman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1940 and founded the security services company Guardsmark in 1963. He was a supporter of civil and human rights organizations, serving on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Board of Trustees for 38 years and receiving its Humanitarian Award in 2018. In 1995 he endowed the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, now at Columbia University; as a 16-year-old, Lipman had been the secret source for Chancellor’s NBC coverage of the 1957 desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School, a fact kept private until 1992. His true passion was the Revolutionary War, and the heart of the collection focuses on the years from the French and Indian War in 1754 to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
One of the most significant works is a unique surviving copy of the earliest obtainable American edition of the Bay Psalm Book (est. $300,000 to $500,000). Printed in 1693, it was formerly in the library of Jonathan Corwin, one of the judges in the 1692 Salem witch trials. The 1640 Cambridge, Massachusetts edition was the first book printed in British America; in 2013 Sotheby’s sold a copy of that edition, from Boston’s Old South Church, for $14.2 million, a world auction record for a printed book.
Among the top lots is a first book-form printing of The Declaration of Independence, appended to the pamphlet Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution just days after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration (est. $250,000 to $350,000). Printed on 8 July 1776, Bell’s edition is one of the rarest and earliest printings, with only three other copies having appeared at auction since the Streeter sale in 1967. The collection also includes two works by Thomas Paine: Common Sense, published in early 1776 (est. $50,000 to $70,000), and The American Crisis (est. $70,000 to $100,000).
A five-line document from March 1777 records Alexander Hamilton’s appointment as Aide-de-Camp to General George Washington (est. $180,000 to $250,000). Other Revolutionary material includes George Washington’s journal from 1753 to 1754, when he was a young major in the British service, in the first London edition to include the important map (est. $50,000 to $70,000); the Bloody Butchery broadside printed by Ezekiel Russell in Salem in April 1775, recording the battles at Lexington and Concord (est. $70,000 to $100,000); and a July 1776 letter from Washington to Nathaniel Woodhull on preparations for the Battle of Long Island (est. $40,000 to $60,000).
Later highlights include an official State Department edition of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the earliest obtainable printing in any form and one of six recorded copies, the only one in private hands (est. $60,000 to $80,000), along with several John Quincy Adams manuscripts documenting his fight against slavery (est. $60,000 to $80,000). Rounding out the collection is a manuscript map of Chesapeake Bay made by a French military cartographer during the siege of Yorktown, which remained in the family of the French commander the Comte de Rochambeau until Lipman acquired it (est. $200,000 to $300,000).
(Press Release)
