| This June 12th, Christie’s Books & Manuscripts department will be presenting two live sales: The Birth of Modern Business: Luca Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000), a stand-alone sale of the original how-to guide for business and a various owner sale of Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts Including Americana. The latter includes over 200 objects ranging from early printed books to 20th-century manuscripts. The public view will open in Christie’s Rockefeller galleries in New York from The collection features additionally important letters and documents by a diverse range of personalities including Ferdinand and Isabella, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Hernando Cortes, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson, George Armstrong Custer, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The auction also features important scientific properties including the original, signed galley proofs of Francis Crick and James Watson’s articles on DNA: “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids” and “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid” (estimate: $180,000-220,000), marking the first time their pioneering work on “the secret of life” ever appeared in print; this is the only known prepublication copy of Watson & Crick’s momentous 1953 paper. Also of interest are a series fresh-to-market Albert Einstein correspondences including a series of letters written to Antonia Stern, the daughter of his close friend, historian Alfred Stern, including letters alluding to a romantic affair between the two in the early 1930s and correspondence between Einstein and Paul Epstein, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, with important letters expressing his discomfort with the implications of quantum theory: “In other words, God tirelessly plays dice under laws which he has himself prescribed.” In |
