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<b>Bonhams:</b> MANDELSHTAM, OSIP. 1891-1938. Autograph Manuscript, 2 pp, [Petersburg,] January 1913, entitled

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The American Experience: 1630-1890: A Collection - By Bruce McKinney A bookplate to remember a sale By Bruce McKinney This article pertains to a collection of early, often important Americana I've consigned to auction at Bonham's in New York on December 2nd. Various links are posted on page 3. Collectible books are usually purchased one at a time. Catalogues, letters, phone calls and emails arrive. Items are noted and identified for consideration. A new possibility becomes a weekend project. Questions are asked, condition and terms discussed and soon enough possibilities turn into purchases that arrive a few days later. A book here and a book there and in a few years the impulse to collect becomes a collection underway. In this way my collection of the American Experience took root and became a passion. It began before the internet and was completed as the flow of rare material streaming onto the internet was beginning to transform the rare book field. Altogether I spent about a decade, 1991-2001, focused on this collection. Its theme, re-embraced in my forties, was American history and the material items that fit within the evolving continuum of thought and perception between 1630 and 1890 in the new world. Ideas it turns out are chameleons, the words more or less the same, their meanings evolving. In collecting there is of course no limit to how subjects are parsed. It is the collector's decisions and discipline that determine. The boundaries are endlessly subject to reinterpretation because seller's sirens are always wailing, the descriptions are always appealing, the material is always attractive, the impulse to acquire always strong. Within the matrix of discipline, desire and seduction random purchases become collections. In this way various and sundry items, the last acquired a decade ago, became the American Experience with an emphasis on changing perception, human understanding being fickle, beauty always in the eyes of the beholder. Freedom, it turns out, is much more than "just another word for nothing left to lose." To different people, be they men, women or children, whatever their color, religion, legal and financial standing, wherever and whenever, they are at once both unique and also threads in tapestries whose colors, like oil on water, appear differently to sundry observers. That historians today more focus on single stories than on broad brush theories recognizes this truth. Any more, the only simple ideas about human history are expressed in grade and high school texts. To the rest of the world fixed perspective is a chimera. Capturing these changing perspectives became my goal.
The American Experience: 1630-1890: A Collection - By Bruce McKinney Bigelow's Botary paid for the Austin Healey Through the 17th century the focus was on establishing ownership via narrative. To look at early maps you might think the territories described had been explored but mostly they hadn't. An expedition west across North America on foot or by canoe and a ship coasting the American western shore, both provided only faint suggestion as to what lay between. Nevertheless flags, that could not be planted in person, were staked on maps and disparate places confirmed as colonies by competing realms in exchange for acknowledgment of their similarly grand claims, the "I'll trade you my Boardwalk for your Pacific and Pennsylvania." "I don't know what to call this continent but I claim it." The American Experience traces evolving hope and aspiration as it hardens into knowledge. When Europeans came to settle these territories they brought three things, disease, perception and ambition. Their immunity to small pox in short order emptied both North and South America of most of its indigenous populations. Guns were hardly necessary. Immune systems that had never experienced small pox collapsed in its wake. Those who survived saw their communities decline. Where they cooperated they were often enslaved or at minimum, marginalized. In the empty space of the new world that emerged though the narratives of successive explorations and colonization the principal export from Europe, and import into the new world became the ideas that germinated into wildly new mutations. Religion, straight-jacketed in Europe, would explode into a thousand variations. Poisonous class and racial ideas would in some places be planted and became impossible to eradicate. In other areas tolerance took hold. Along the way fear and avarice were sometimes coachmen on the wagons moving west. History wasn't always pretty but it could be cleaned and often was. It turns out historical memory has always been a suspect thing. The colonies rebelled but only landed white men could vote. Woman and slaves existed but just below the story line. In time we would remember that slavery ended but ignore that it had existed. In the post Civil War south the black was re-enslaved for another one hundred years under the rubric of Jim Crow. But never mind. If slavery was once the accepted standard we instead remember that it ended. If women were repressed and subjugated we remember they won the right to vote in 1920. If blacks were harried, suppressed and held in temporal bondage in the south and later corralled into circumscribed spaces in the north we choose instead to remember Martin Luther King. In doing this we remember our achievements but also distort the past. It's not wrong to remember heroes but it is a mistake to misremember history. The American story is a difficult tale and its original source material the records that confirm its complexity, an extraordinary story but one told as often in omission as in declarative sentences. It is a mind-numbing indictment that reality is, and always has been, mostly a bystander when history has been written.
The American Experience: 1630-1890: A Collection - By Bruce McKinney Understanding this disconnect, between what has been written and what happened, was my ambition in piecing together the true story from the disparate facts. In this collection a general contemporary consensus emerges. This is why I built this collection: to identify the differences between reality and historical interpretation. Another person pursing a similar goal could collect other material and reach different conclusions. Did I collect to learn or confirm? The truth probably lies somewhere in between. For collectors to pursue important material the impulse will always be strong but the motivations differ widely. All this said, collections have a time and place. They both reflect the collector, their sources and ambitions and the world they inhabit. The individual books themselves each have a history, their provenance part of the story that connects present and past collectors in an ongoing parade. Such continuity, it turns out, is important for books are an intellectual currency whose dividends are often paid in connection. Beyond the material there are also its circumstances. The collection, 314 items that cost $3.3 million more than a decade ago, are described in a particularly transparent way. Acquisition source, date and price are, when confirmed, provided. The sale is unreserved and extended payment terms provided. Total purchases of $2,500 may be settled in 90 days, purchases of $5,000 and more paid over six months. If you would like to receive a hardbound copy of the catalogue click here to sign-up. If you would like to view the electronic catalogue now click here. If you would like to view the fourth video relating to this sale and the first in which I'm interviewed about it, click here. Bonham's, with its series of videos relating to this sale, has provided a perspective that will be useful to consignors and bidders looking to understand what consigning and selling entails.

The American Experience: 1630-1890: A Collection

- By Bruce McKinney

A bookplate to remember a sale

By Bruce McKinney

This article pertains to a collection of early, often important Americana I've consigned to auction at Bonham's in New York on December 2nd.

Various links are posted on page 3.

Collectible books are usually purchased one at a time. Catalogues, letters, phone calls and emails arrive. Items are noted and identified for consideration. A new possibility becomes a weekend project. Questions are asked, condition and terms discussed and soon enough possibilities turn into purchases that arrive a few days later. A book here and a book there and in a few years the impulse to collect becomes a collection underway. In this way my collection of the American Experience took root and became a passion. It began before the internet and was completed as the flow of rare material streaming onto the internet was beginning to transform the rare book field. Altogether I spent about a decade, 1991-2001, focused on this collection.

Its theme, re-embraced in my forties, was American history and the material items that fit within the evolving continuum of thought and perception between 1630 and 1890 in the new world. Ideas it turns out are chameleons, the words more or less the same, their meanings evolving. In collecting there is of course no limit to how subjects are parsed. It is the collector's decisions and discipline that determine. The boundaries are endlessly subject to reinterpretation because seller's sirens are always wailing, the descriptions are always appealing, the material is always attractive, the impulse to acquire always strong.

Within the matrix of discipline, desire and seduction random purchases become collections. In this way various and sundry items, the last acquired a decade ago, became the American Experience with an emphasis on changing perception, human understanding being fickle, beauty always in the eyes of the beholder. Freedom, it turns out, is much more than "just another word for nothing left to lose." To different people, be they men, women or children, whatever their color, religion, legal and financial standing, wherever and whenever, they are at once both unique and also threads in tapestries whose colors, like oil on water, appear differently to sundry observers. That historians today more focus on single stories than on broad brush theories recognizes this truth. Any more, the only simple ideas about human history are expressed in grade and high school texts. To the rest of the world fixed perspective is a chimera. Capturing these changing perspectives became my goal.

The American Experience: 1630-1890: A Collection

- By Bruce McKinney

Bigelow's Botary paid for the Austin Healey

Through the 17th century the focus was on establishing ownership via narrative. To look at early maps you might think the territories described had been explored but mostly they hadn't. An expedition west across North America on foot or by canoe and a ship coasting the American western shore, both provided only faint suggestion as to what lay between. Nevertheless flags, that could not be planted in person, were staked on maps and disparate places confirmed as colonies by competing realms in exchange for acknowledgment of their similarly grand claims, the "I'll trade you my Boardwalk for your Pacific and Pennsylvania." "I don't know what to call this continent but I claim it." The American Experience traces evolving hope and aspiration as it hardens into knowledge.

When Europeans came to settle these territories they brought three things, disease, perception and ambition. Their immunity to small pox in short order emptied both North and South America of most of its indigenous populations. Guns were hardly necessary. Immune systems that had never experienced small pox collapsed in its wake. Those who survived saw their communities decline. Where they cooperated they were often enslaved or at minimum, marginalized. In the empty space of the new world that emerged though the narratives of successive explorations and colonization the principal export from Europe, and import into the new world became the ideas that germinated into wildly new mutations. Religion, straight-jacketed in Europe, would explode into a thousand variations. Poisonous class and racial ideas would in some places be planted and became impossible to eradicate. In other areas tolerance took hold.

Along the way fear and avarice were sometimes coachmen on the wagons moving west. History wasn't always pretty but it could be cleaned and often was. It turns out historical memory has always been a suspect thing. The colonies rebelled but only landed white men could vote. Woman and slaves existed but just below the story line. In time we would remember that slavery ended but ignore that it had existed. In the post Civil War south the black was re-enslaved for another one hundred years under the rubric of Jim Crow. But never mind. If slavery was once the accepted standard we instead remember that it ended. If women were repressed and subjugated we remember they won the right to vote in 1920. If blacks were harried, suppressed and held in temporal bondage in the south and later corralled into circumscribed spaces in the north we choose instead to remember Martin Luther King. In doing this we remember our achievements but also distort the past. It's not wrong to remember heroes but it is a mistake to misremember history.

The American story is a difficult tale and its original source material the records that confirm its complexity, an extraordinary story but one told as often in omission as in declarative sentences. It is a mind-numbing indictment that reality is, and always has been, mostly a bystander when history has been written.

The American Experience: 1630-1890: A Collection

- By Bruce McKinney

Understanding this disconnect, between what has been written and what happened, was my ambition in piecing together the true story from the disparate facts. In this collection a general contemporary consensus emerges. This is why I built this collection: to identify the differences between reality and historical interpretation. Another person pursing a similar goal could collect other material and reach different conclusions. Did I collect to learn or confirm? The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

For collectors to pursue important material the impulse will always be strong but the motivations differ widely.

All this said, collections have a time and place. They both reflect the collector, their sources and ambitions and the world they inhabit. The individual books themselves each have a history, their provenance part of the story that connects present and past collectors in an ongoing parade. Such continuity, it turns out, is important for books are an intellectual currency whose dividends are often paid in connection.

Beyond the material there are also its circumstances. The collection, 314 items that cost $3.3 million more than a decade ago, are described in a particularly transparent way. Acquisition source, date and price are, when confirmed, provided. The sale is unreserved and extended payment terms provided. Total purchases of $2,500 may be settled in 90 days, purchases of $5,000 and more paid over six months.

If you would like to receive a hardbound copy of the catalogue click here to sign-up.

If you would like to view the electronic catalogue now click here.

If you would like to view the fourth video relating to this sale and the first in which I'm interviewed about it, click here. Bonham's, with its series of videos relating to this sale, has provided a perspective that will be useful to consignors and bidders looking to understand what consigning and selling entails.