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Fine Books and Manuscripts, Featuring Mystery and Detective Literature
Our summer book auction features a wide array of modern first editions, signed books, artwork, collectibles, and literary rarities across all genres and at all collecting levels. The sale will also feature an extensive selection of objects in the detective literature genre, and works related to the world's "greatest consulting detective," Sherlock Holmes.
Auction Highlights
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I Know What You're Thinking: The Collection of the Amazing Kreskin
The Amazing Kreskin (George Kresge, 1935 - 2024) was an internationally famous mentalist - a man who could read thoughts. Over the course of a career spanning eight decades, he amassed an incredible collection of arcane objects, and a vast library of books on conjuring, hypnotism, and the unusual. On August 16, Potter & Potter will bring his collection to auction, featuring unusual pieces of magic apparatus and mind-reading memorabilia, relics from his hundreds of television appearances, and more. Complementing Kreskin's collection will be a diverse offering of rare magic posters, tricks, books, and ephemera from the "golden age" of the art.
Auction Highlights
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Coin Op & Advertising
Our summer sale is set to feature a broad range of coin-operated machines and vintage advertising featuring a range of porcelain signs, vending machines, Coca-Cola and soda pop advertising, slot machines and trade stimulators, ice cream and soda fountain collectibles, gambling collectibles, liquor and beer advertising, and more.
Auction Highlights
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Select Rarities: Exceptional Books & Manuscripts
This premier auction features a select group of unusual, uncommon, and choice rarities. A carefully curated offering of printed matter, autographs, and other ephemeral objects, the sale will be led by a first edition of The Book of Mormon, the most important nineteenth century religious book printed in the United States. Also crossing the block are highlights from the pens of Twain and Steinbeck, important modern firsts (some in exceptional condition), Lincolniana, a newly discovered mugshot of Malcolm X, and rare comic books from Marvel's heyday.
Auction Highlights
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Cabinet of Curiosities
Join us this September for an auction replete with the rare, the odd, and the unusual. From medical curiosities and tattoo flash, to sideshow imagery and carnival wheels, horror classics by Stephen King and movie posters for sci-fi thrillers, this is a seasonal sale of the macabre and the magnificent. A diverse grouping of vintage automatons from the Parisian workshops of Labert, Vichy, and Roullet & Decamps will also be part of this exceptional, can't-believe-it offering.
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Belonging: Secrets, Goats, and Signs • The Art of American Fraternal Societies
This auction - the first of its kind - celebrates the art, ritual objects, and ephemera of American fraternal organizations from the collection of Bruce and Julie Webb. These secretive societies - including the Oddfellows, Freemasons, Knight of Pythias, Shriners, and Elks - generated attractive, bizarre, and fantastical objects of all kinds. Paintings, costumes, arms & armor, prank-like (and mischievous) initiation devices, prints, lithographs, wood carvings, and "folk art" with a macabre bent are all hallmarks of their output. Examples in each category will be featured in the auction. With Lynne Adele, Bruce Lee Webb authored As Above, So Below: Art of the American Fraternal Society, 1850-1930, with a foreword by noted collector David Byrne of the Talking Heads.
Auction Highlights