Displaying items by tag: books

From December 2-5, 2015 Sotheby’s New York will present the single-owner sale of Property from the Collection of Robert S Pirie, one of the world’s leading book collectors. Over 60 years, Mr. Pirie built the finest collection of 16th and 17th-century English literature in private hands with significant copies of works by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, and John Donne among others. Mr. Pirie was a knowledgeable and dedicated collector whose library is made all the more extraordinary by the particular emphasis he placed on the hardest to find works with distinguished provenance. In addition to his prominence in the world of rare books, Mr. Pirie was a leading financier and widely admired New York Renaissance Man.

The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent once declared of his partner Pierre Bergé: “The world will talk about a Goût Bergé, just as it speaks of a Goût Noailles.”

As the $484 million auction of the couple’s art collection at Christie’s in 2009 can attest to, this “Bergé taste” is the epitome of a keen eye, and a penchant for objects with great history and pedigree. Over the next two years, more examples of Bergé’s fine collectibles are scheduled to go under the hammer in Paris, this time at Sotheby’s — in the form of 1,600 precious books, manuscripts and musical scores from his personal library that date from the 15th to the 20th century.

Two rare 17th century books stolen from the National Library of Sweden are being returned to the Scandinavian country.

U.S. authorities say a repatriation ceremony was held Wednesday in New York.

The books were among dozens of precious manuscripts stolen by a library employee between 1995 and 2004.

At first glance the 25 artifacts displayed in the courtyard of a former convent just off the Tiber River here on Tuesday seemed to have little in common: three first-century B.C. fresco fragments from Pompeii were exhibited alongside fifth- and sixth-century B.C. Etruscan and Attic vases, a 17th-century Venetian cannon, a 12th-century mural fragment depicting Christ and three rare 17th-century books. What they shared was a nefarious past.

Dutch graphic artist Irma Boom is renowned for designing books whose contents have been filtered through her idiosyncratic view of the world. How fitting, then, that she was asked to design a book for New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as it celebrated its recent renovation of the Carnegie Mansion.

The Cooper Hewitt is the only museum in the U.S. exclusively devoted to design, and its vast collection (more than 210,000 objects, spanning 30 centuries) must have served as a near-limitless playground for Boom’s imagination.

Princeton University has announced the largest gift in its history: a trove of rare books valued at nearly $300 million, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, all four of Shakespeare’s Folios and significant musical manuscripts written by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.

The Scheide Library, named for the family of the philanthropist and scholar William H. Scheide, has been housed in a special room in Princeton’s Firestone Library since 1959, when Mr. Scheide, who died last November at age 100, moved it there from his family home in Titusville, Pa. The bequest makes Princeton the permanent home of what the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called “one of the greatest collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world today.”

An employee at Russia's Hermitage Museum was arrested for stealing books and documents, some centuries-old, from the institution's celebrated collection and then trying to sell them to antique dealers, officials said Monday.

The man, who worked in the library of the Saint Petersburg museum, was taken into custody Friday in connection with a probe launched after items were found missing during an inspection last month, Russia's secret service FSB said in a statement.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded to Yale University Press an $840,000 grant to establish a new electronic portal on which curated and customizable art and architectural history content will be made available to consumers and institutions.

The grant will allow Yale University Press, one of the world’s leading publishers of art and architecture books, to expand both the utility of and the readership for its award-winning and critically acclaimed art and architecture backlist by making text and images available electronically at a reasonable cost or for free. Users also will be able to customize the content, making course packs or creating other digital publications from a variety of texts.

The registrar at the National Arts Club in Manhattan decided last summer to impose some order on a donated collection of books that once belonged to the Ashcan artist Robert Henri.

It was long overdue. Henri was one of the club’s most prominent members. He organized a groundbreaking 1904 exhibition of American painters at the club’s original building on West 34th Street in Manhattan. When the club moved to the former Samuel J. Tilden mansion on Gramercy Park South, Henri’s studio was just two doors away.

The descendants of the goldfish glinting in the shady water, in a painting going on view at Sotheby’s auctioneers, are still swimming in the same pond today. The pond was dug by Winston Churchill at his beloved home, Chartwell in Kent, and the original fish were a present from Harrods.

His painting of the scene is one of the star items in an auction of personal possessions left by his last surviving child, Lady Mary Soames, who died last June aged 91.

together with furniture, jewelery, photographs, books – many signed by the authors – and silverware including the dishes which his budgie Toby was trained to march up and down the dinner table and serve salt from, is on public display at Sotheby’s in Bond Street from now until the auction next Wednesday, December 17.