Valuable Books and Manuscripts

Christie’s Valuable Books and Manuscripts auction brings together an exceptional selection of manuscripts, printed books, and cartographic masterpieces spanning six centuries of intellectual achievement.

Among the highlights of the Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts group are splendid examples of Flemish and French Books of Hours, a collection of Romanesque manuscripts with monastic provenance, and the earliest manuscript of Sallust to have been offered at auction in over a century. The autograph section features a newly-surfaced 1940 autograph manuscript by Albert Einstein on his pursuit of a unified field theory, which leads a remarkable selection of works documenting the development of modern physics, mathematics and scientific thought though figures including Max Planck, Henri Poincaré, Marie Curie and Werner Heisenberg.

At the heart of the sale is ‘An Alchemy of Ideas: Works from the Mickey Cartin Collection’, an outstanding assembly of books tracing the transmission of knowledge from classical antiquity to the modern age. Highlights include the first complete edition of Plato in Greek, Georg Bartisch’s pioneering illustrated study of ophthalmology, the magnificently illustrated Theuerdank, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Giorgio Vasari’s celebrated Lives of the Artists. We are delighted to present Gerard Mercator’s monumental Atlas sive Cosmographicae (1585-1595), one of the defining monuments of early modern cartography, as well as a major presentation copy of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, inscribed to Sarah Bernhardt, and a magnificent copy of the first Arabic-script book printed in Eastern Europe, preserved in an exquisite Romanian binding of the early 18th century.

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