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Upon her death on January 7, 2013 at the age of 91, Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), a pioneering architecture critic, writer and historian, left her entire estate and her archives to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The bequest also included an apartment in New York City, a house in Marblehead, MA, and the archives of Huxtable’s husband, industrial designer, Garth Huxtable (1911-1989).  Huxtable served as the architecture critic for the New York Times from 1963 to 1982 (she was the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper) and as a writer for the Wall Street Journal.

The Huxtable Archives, which include notes, correspondence, research files, manuscripts, drawings, and photography, will become part of the Getty’s Special Collections holdings. Huxtable, a proponent of historic preservation, will have her own groundbreaking work conserved for the benefit of the public and the field of architecture thanks to her partnership with the Getty.

One of the biggest sales at Doyle New York’s Rare Books, Autographs, and Photographs auction on November 5 was an important letter by George Washington. Purchased by a private collector for $362,500, the letter surpassed its pre-sale estimate of $80,000-$100,000. It was the fourth highest price paid at auction for a letter by Washington and the highest price for a single-page letter.

Written to James McHenry, Washington’s wartime aide on December 10, 1783, the President writes of his intention to resign as Continental Commander and become “translated into a private Citizen.” The letter was sold with McHenry’s archives in 1859 to Baltimore collector William T. Walters. It remained in Walters’ family until it was offered at Doyle’s auction.

The entire sale totaled $1,604,594, surpassing the pre-sale estimate of $849,200 to $1,255,000 and 90% of lots sold. Besides George Washington’s letter, major sales included John Webster’s The Deuils Law Case… (1623), the first quarto edition, which achieved $25,000; a set of Author’s Autograph Edition of Whitman that sold for $22,500; and a letter from Paul Gauguin to Camille Pissarro that brought $28,125.