Rare Books

In San Francisco last month a collection of rare books, valued at $200,000 and owned by John Henry Nash, wealthy California printer, was sold to the University of Oregon for $50,000 to be paid "as and when the university can." But that did not mean that rare-book prices are down, or that collectors are not buying. At Sotheby's in London, the three-day auction of the Mortimer Schiff library brought -L-22,028. A first edition of Moliere's Les Precieuses Ridicules brought the record price of -L-880. For an undisclosed sum, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C. purchased the Harmsworth collection of books printed in England between 1475 and 1640, valued at $2,500,000, and including such rare items as the only known copy of the first edition of Spenser's Faerie Queen. In Manhattan at an auction arranged by the League of American Writers for the benefit of Loyalist Spain, the manuscript of Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England sold for $800 and manuscripts donated by Booth Tarkington, Alfred Einstein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, some 100 others, brought the total to $5,000.

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