SAN FRANCISCO – PBA Galleries’ sale of rare maps on Oct. 29 realized $1.55 million, the highest auction total in the company’s history. Absentee and Internet live bidding was available through LiveAuctioneers.com.
“Rare Cartography, Exploration & Voyages: The Warren Heckrotte Collection, Part I – Exploration & Early Approaches,” a 202-lot offering, concentrated on the exploration and mapping of the Americas, with particular attention paid to the west and northwest coasts of North America.
Warren Heckrotte began collecting in the 1960s, and his superb and extensive collection of maps, books, and atlases contained many scarce items that had not been on the market in several decades, some of which only a handful of copies are known to exist.
Three lots topped the $100,000 mark, with only five minor lots going unsold. The first of the six-figure lots was John Green’s Remarks in Support of the New Chart of North and South America; in Six Sheets (below), 1753, the text accompanied by the rare six-sheet map, bound together in period full red calf tooled in gilt with the arms of a Portuguese marquis. The Remarks and highly influential map, which was the first to assign the name Bering to the strait between Asia and North America, was bid to $131,500, well over the $20,000-$30,000 estimate. Like a number of the rarities in the auction, the Green chart with the Remarks comes to the market so seldom that it is hard to predict what the results might be – in fact this very copy last sold at auction for $2,175 back in 1980.
The next of the hundred thousand dollar lots was the rare account by Gavrilla Andreevich Sarychev of the eight-year Russian expedition under Joseph Billings to explore the shores of northeastern Siberia, the Sea of Okhotsk, Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands, and part of the American continent. Complete with the highly desirable atlas of 51 maps and views, the rare Russian-language set, published in St. Petersburg in 1802, brought a record $143,000, topping, then toppling, the estimate of $30,000-$50,000.
This was followed by one of the rarest items in the auction, Miguel Costansó’s Carta Reducida Del Oceano Asiatico, Ó Mar Del Sur, Que Comprehende La Costa Oriental Y Occidental De La Peninsula De La California, a separately issued chart derived from the Spanish expeditions into California in 1769 and 1770, in which San Diego and Monterey were founded. The Bay of San Francisco was also discovered, and this chart, dated 1771 and published in Madrid, was the first printed map to show the San Francisco Bay. With only six or so copies known to exist (bibliographers differ), it is of both great rarity and importance, and met with well-deserved attention when bid to $131,500, shattering the $20,000-$30,000 estimate.
An important series of large maps by Aaron Arrowsmith, presenting up-to-date cartography of the world and in particular the northern and western reaches of North America created strong bidding, with the stiffest competition being for the first 1802 issue of A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America. This scarce map is of utmost significance in the annals of U.S. history, being the same issue as the map that was carried by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their epic journey across the continent. Estimated at $20,000-$30,000, it sold for $84,000.
All prices listed include the buyer’s premium.
For more information contact PBA Galleries at 415-989-2665 or pba@pbagalleries.com.
Click here to view the fully illustrated catalog for this sale, complete with prices realized.