William Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain and Secunda Etas Mundi Map to Auction
From The Story of the Glittering Plain
The Kelmscott Press edition of William Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain, or the Land of Living Men is among the headliners in PBA Galleries' Rare Books, Manuscripts and More sale today. As well as being an influence on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien its typography, paper and binding represent a crowning point in publishing.
Also going under the hammer is the highly decorated world map Secunda Etas Mundi from the Nuremberg Chronicle which gives an indication of the known world on the eve of the Age of Discovery. Published in ignorance of Columbus’s first voyage the previous year, this first edition woodcut is also visually distinctive thanks to the “monstrous races” of medieval myth that invade the margins and wa cut in the workshop of Michael Woglemut where a young Albrecht Dürer was a pupil.
Other highlights include:
- a complete copy of Salomon Trismosin’s Aureum vellus, a foundational alchemical text that includes the 22 plates comprising the Splendor Solis - this second edition, though printed a century after the first, is actually of greater rarity
- the Catalogue of the Collection of Jewels and Precious Works of Art, the Property of J. Pierpont Morgan, one of three catalogues of Morgan’s collection produced by the art historian George C. Williamson
- Relacion del viage hecho por los goletas Sutil y Mexicana which ncludes the atlas volume which contains a series of plates of Nootka important in the history of ethnography. It comes with nine maps and eight illustrations all in original speckled calf with gilt decorations
