Browse Items (131 total)

Chromolithograph, 20½ x 28 in.

Provenance: George Frost, prominent Riverside orange grower and one of the promoters of this fair, with his annotations.

Los Angeles, in the late nineteenth century, was a city unlike any other. Garlanded with…

Watercolor on thick paper, 19 x 16½ in.

Provenance: Philatelist and writer Frank Staff.

One of the earliest mailed valentines, this message is filled with tender emotion. It is a superb tribute to love, crafted by a sailor returning home to his…

Etching, signed by Buchinger, ink on paper.

Matthew Buchinger (1674–1739) was a phocomelic, twenty-nine-inch-tall overachiever. He was a legless and armless conjurer and calligrapher who danced the hornpipe and played more than a half-dozen…

Watercolor and gold on paper, each 7¼ x 4 in.

I have been collecting Indian miniatures since 1967, when I was introduced to them by my cousin, and then-employer, the bookseller H. P. Kraus. This pair is by far the most personal of the collection.…

Pen and wash on paper, 7½ x 5 in.

This is a preparatory drawing for The Staghunt at Aranjuez, a major painting by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, an assistant to, and later son-in-law of, Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. The painting hangs in the…

Text manuscript on vellum, in Gothic minuscule.

Provenance: Julian Wolff.

Written by a single scribe in Gothic minuscule: two columns in black ink, rubricated, with marginalia, the Minor Prophets’ texts underlined in red; gatherings end with…

I discovered that a critical source for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) was the novel The Salem Belle (1842)—and I also found, through archival work, that the author of this latter book was Ebenezer Wheelwright. I discussed…

Provenance: Noted bibliophile John Quinn.

Poems and Ballads presents Swinburne’s most characteristic writing, rich with classical inspiration. Moxon published the book in July 1866, but soon suppressed it when reviewers assailed its sensuality.…

This important “little magazine” of poetry and art was published during a time when little magazines were frequently the voice of the counterculture. A special “Vietnam Assemblage” issue, it features a cover by Andy Warhol and is described as “an…

The celebrated ėpistoliėre, whose letters to her daughter are a classic of French literature, was in fine form on the day she wrote this one as she was anticipating a visit from her within mere days. (Madame de Sévigné’s letters are so cherished that…