Magnificent large plates of <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=arthur%20rackham&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Rackham</a>'s famous work, <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=Peter%20Pan&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Peter Pan</a> in Kensington Gardens.<ul><li>Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (English).</li><li>J.M. Barrie (Scottish).</li><li>Peter Pan Portfolio from Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie.&nbsp;</li><li>New York:&nbsp;Brentano,&nbsp;1914.</li><li>12 large color plates mounted in mattes with lettered tissue guards.</li><li>Half tan cloth with yellow silk moire.</li></ul> Lavish limited US edition of the striking portfolio version of Rackham's selected color plates from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The detail and colors are breathtaking, and the large size of the plates does justice to Rackham's mastery. The plates are the sizes of the original art executed by Rackham and, in some cases, larger. Issued in a format meant for owners to be able to frame the plates for display, it is rare to find it complete.

Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens Portfolio

Rare French movie poster for the Disney classic Peter Pan.<ul><li>Roger Soubie (French, 1898-1984).</li><li>Walt Disney Studios.</li><li>RKO Radio Films.</li><li>Linen-backed paper.</li></ul>

Peter Pan French Movie Poster

A Danish <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/collectibles/vintage-poster/film" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">movie poster</a> for the Walt Disney film <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/search?query=Peter%20Pan&amp;tab=objects&amp;sortBy=bsp_dotcom_prod_en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Peter Pan</a>.<ul><li>Walt Disney Studios.</li><li>Linen backed.</li><li>This work is presented unframed.</li></ul>

Danish Peter Pan Movie Poster

The Jay T. Snider Collection of Benjamin Franklin

Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register for the 1729 Currency Emission

Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register for the 1729 Currency Emission This Indenture Made the [blank space] Day of [blank space] in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and [blank space] Between [blank space] of the one Part, and Samuel Carpenter, Jeremiah Langhorne, William Fishbourn and Philip Taylor, Trustees of the General Loan-Office of the Province of Pensylvania, of the other Part, Witnesseth, that the said [blank space] in Consideration of the Value of [blank space] in Bills of Credit of the said Province to [blank space] in Hand paid by the said Trustees, (pursuant to the Trust reposed in them by an Act of General Assembly of this Province, entituled, An Act for Emitting of Thirty Thousand Pounds in Bills of Credit, for the better Support of Government, and the Trade of this Province) The Receipt whereof he the said [blank space] doth hereby acknowledge, Hath granted, bargained and sold, and by these Presents Doth grant, bargain and sell unto the said Trustees of the General Loan-Office of the Province of Pensylvania, their Successors and Assigns. … [Philadelphia: Printed by Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith, August/September 1729] Royal folio volume comprising 137 leaves (460 x 293 mm) of fine imported paper (watermarked Strasbourg bend, countermarked IV), printed recto and verso with the foregoing 51-line form in Franklin’s typefont pica no. 1 and cast heading A (This Indenture), first 132 leaves accomplished and witnessed recto and verso and paginated in a contemporary hand 1–264, final 5 leaves unaccomplished and unpaginated, 5 leaves evidently excised shortly after the volume was bound and certainly before being paginated; scattered light browning. Contemporary blind-panelled calf, by, or employing the tools of, William Davies, plain endpapers and edges; worn and restored, but covers and spine largely preserved. Half russet morocco folding-box, chemise. Job printing, especially what Franklin called “little jobs”—blank forms (indentures, bonds, bills of lading, meeting invitations and notices, receipts), handbills, lottery tickets, bookplates, and all other manner of printed ephemera—was vital to eighteenth-century printers. “The importance of small jobs lay not so much in the amount of revenue they generated, but the fact that it was ready money. That is why Franklin stopped all other work to print them. Cash flow was a perennial problem for printers, and more generally, a shortage of cash was endemic in the early eighteenth-century American economy. Franklin was a tireless proponent of increasing the money supply by printing paper money, which in turn led to his getting the biggest ‘little Job’ of all” (Green & Stallybrass, p. 52). Franklin’s biggest little job—also one of his first commissions and certainly the very first for the provincial government of Pennsylvania—is represented in the present volume of mortgage forms that backed 1729 emission of paper currency. At the time, paper money in Pennsylvania was issued by the Loan Office, essentially acting as a land bank. The Loan Office issued “mortgages that were paid out in newly created paper money. The loans were repaid over a period of time, but while the paper money was in circulation, it increased the money supply for all” (Green & Stallybrass, p. 52). Once the loans were fully repaid, the bills were taken out of circulation and destroyed, and much commerce would revert to barter, exchange of accepted commodities, or any available specie, mostly Spanish. Like most tradesmen and small businessmen, Franklin opposed strict limits on how much paper money was in circulation. Unlike most tradesmen and small businessmen, Franklin did something about it: he anonymously wrote and printed A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. He later reflected in the autobiography that the pamphlet “was well receiv'd by the common People in general; but the Rich Men dislik'd it; for it increas'd and strengthen'd the Clamor for more Money; and they happening to have no Writers among them that were able to answer it, their Opposition slacken'd, and the Point was carried by a Majority in the House.” The point carried by the Pennsylvania Assembly was An Act for Emitting of Thirty Thousand Pounds in Bills of Credit, for the better Support of Government, and the Trade of this Province, which revitalized the economy of Pennsylvania. In the autobiography, Franklin wrote that his friends in the legislature, conceiving that his Modest Enquiry “had been of some Service, thought fit to reward me, by employing me in printing the Money, a very profitable Job, and a great Help to me.” This, however, was a faulty memory, at least in part: the commission for paper currency went to his rival Andrew Bradford, but Franklin was not entirely overlooked. He was engaged to print the mortgage indenture forms for the 1729 emission. Previous emissions of these bills of credit in 1723 and 1726 had been recorded by mortgage contracts written entirely by hand by clerks in the Loan Office. Since the text of each indenture was to follow a strict legal formula and be uniform with the others, they were an ideal object for typographic reproduction. Everyone benefitted, with the possible exception of the Loan Office scriveners. Had Franklin more accurately recalled the favor granted by the Assembly, the significance of this remarkable volume of accomplished and witnessed indenture forms from the 1729 emission of bills of credit might have been recognized earlier. The importance of the 1729 General Loan Office Mortgage Register is not simply in the information it provides about Benjamin Franklin’s early career, or about eighteenth-century job-printing practices in general, but rather for the rich background material it supplies about Philadelphia in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The 264 mortgages recorded herein account almost entirely for the total sum lent out by the 1729 emission act: the Assembly authorized £26,000 to be lent (with another £4,000 reserved for other purposes), and the value of the mortgages included in the present register total £25,971. A very useful appendix in Keith Arbour’s indispensable study of the Snider mortgage register indexes all of the mortgagees by name, with their occupation, place of residence, and amount of the paper money loaned. As Arbour writes, “The Snider volume provides equally useful information for historians of the early Pennsylvania economy, and for prosopographers of colonial Pennsylvania. Some of the data recorded in the Snider volume may prompt re-examination of conclusions reached by historians who necessarily worked without access to the long-lost register” (p. 78). In his highly engaging memoir, Fifty Years a Bookseller: or, The Wolf at Your Door (Bryn Mawr: Privately Printed, 2025), Clarence Wolf amusingly writes of his purchase in the early 1990s of the mortgage register from a bookshop that did not recognize its significance—and that had reneged on an major deal with him earlier. Wolf realized that the bound forms could only have been printed by Andrew Bradford, Samuel Keimer, or the recently established firm of Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith. With his suspicion that the pica type employed was from Franklin’s shop confirmed by James Green, Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Wolf placed the mortgage register—as he had done with many other Franklin rarities—with Jay Snider. He never told the seller what he had overlooked. All of Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable achievements in science, invention, writing, government service, diplomacy, and the many other intellectual spheres that he orbited were made possible by his success as a printer, which provided him funds and leisure to live a (very active) life of the mind. And Franklin’s success as a printer was due in large part to these mortgage forms printed for the 1729 Pennsylvania act of emission of bills of credit. “[T]he register was Franklin's first piece of official printing for any arm of the provincial government. As such, it was the opportunity he had sought formally since February 18, 1729. In seeking this first opportunity he had three goals: to demonstrate his ability to produce fine work for the province on demand; to prove (with something more substantial than a broadside) the superiority of his work to Andrew Bradford's; and thereby to break Bradford's lock on government printing. Awarded the printing of the register, Franklin used the opportunity to great effect. Within three months of presenting the nearly flawlessly printed register to the Loan Office trustees, Franklin and Meredith ‘obtain’d, thro' [Franklin's] Friend [speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly Andrew] Hamilton’ a weightier and more lucrative job: ‘the Printing of the NewCastle Paper Money.’ Shortly thereafter, on January 30, 1730, the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to have Franklin and Meredith—rather than Bradford—print the next installment of the Assembly's session laws. This is generally interpreted as the vote that made Franklin and Meredith the Assembly's official printers. Whether or not this interpretation is entirely correct, Franklin and his printing office held this remunerative position for the next thirty-six years” (Arbour, pp. 24–25). (Referring to the printing of these mortgage forms as “flawless” is not an exaggeration. According to Arbour, just a single line of the 14,178 lines contained in the volume was poorly inked and had to be supplied in manuscript by a clerk.) REFERENCES Keith Arbour, Benjamin Franklin’s First Government Printing: The Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register of 1729, and Subsequent Franklin Mortgage Registers and Bonds (American Philosophical Society, 1999); Arbour, Additions to Miller 1 (in the preceding); James N. Green & Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (Oak Knoll, 2006), pp. 47–55; cf. Farley Grubb, Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia & The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2006) PROVENANCE William Desmpster (the gift of his aunt, Mrs. Mclain, 1891; inscription on front free endpaper) — Baldwin's Book Barn, West Chester, Pennsylvania — Clarence Wolf, George MacManus Company

View 1 of Lot 4: Pennsylvania General Loan Office | Benjamin Franklin's First Government Printing

pennsylvania general loan office | benjamin franklin's first government printing

Benjamin Franklin Autograph letter signed (“B Franklin”) to John Ladd (“Sir”), half page (312 x 192 mm) on a leaf of laid paper (watermarked heraldic shield), [Philadelphia,] 12 June 1738, regarding Ladd’s purchase of books from Franklin’s shop, verso with autograph address panel and reception docket; browned, worn at folds with some neat repair. Half green morocco folding-case gilt, chemise. Benjamin Franklin as bookseller. In the 25 May 1738 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, and subsequently, Franklin advertised a list of books “Just Imported,” which included The Ladies’ Library, 3 volumes duodecimo, and Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer, 11 volumes duodecimo. He here writes to John Ladd, surveyor from Gloucester County, New Jersey, confirming his purchase of The Ladies' Library and the balance of a set of Cervantes, probably John Ozell’s revision of Peter Motteux’s English translation: “I send you the Ladies Library & the other two Vols. of Don Quixote. “The Homers I have are done by Pope. The Iliads are in 6 vols. 12mo price 45/. The Odysseys 5 vols. 12mo price 37/6. They are beautifully printed and neatly bound. I will not part with them until I hear from you. I am Sir Your most hum[bl]e Serv[an]t.” Ladd’s purchase of The Ladies’ Library and Don Quixote is recorded in Franklin’s Shop Book, June 9, 1738, wherein is also noted, July 19, his acquisition of the 11-volume set of Pope’s Homer for £4 2s. 6d. Sales of other books to Ladd are entered in Franklin’s Ledger D. John Ladd (d. 1770) went on to serve as a justice of the peace; he was elected to the New Jersey Assembly in 1754 and appointed to the Governor’s Council in 1763. This is one of the very earliest of Franklin’s letters to survive. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin records nine letters of earlier date, but of these, five are known only by earlier publications or transcriptions, the originals having been lost, and two others survive only as drafts (one incomplete). Therefore, this letter to Ladd is the third earliest complete letter by Franklin to survive and the earliest in private hands. REFERENCES The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, 2:206–207 (not locating the original, text taken from a transcript in the Historical Society of Haddonfield, New Jersey, with significant variation from the autograph letter) PROVENANCE “A Philadelphia Gentleman” (Christie’s New York, 20 May 1994, lot 31)

View 1 of Lot 12: Benjamin Franklin | One of Franklin's very earliest surviving letters

benjamin franklin | one of franklin's very earliest surviving letters

Benjamin Franklin Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth. Philadelphia: [by Franklin and Hall], in the year, M.DCC.XLIX (1749) 8vo (194 x 115 mm). Woodcut vignette to title-page; some foxing, browning, and offsetting, dampstaining to final few leaves, repair to upper corner of D3. Full antique brown calf. Covers decoratively paneled and ruled in blind and gilt. Housed in custom slipcase and folding chemise. First edition of the work that led to the establishment of the University of Pennsylvania. "It has long been regretted as a Misfortune to the Youth of this Province, that we have no ACADEMY, in which they might receive the Accomplishments of a regular Education" (Advertisement to the Reader). By 1740, Franklin was satisfied with his life in Pennsylvania; however, he regretted that no provision was made “for a compleat Education of Youth.” In 1743, he drafted a proposal for establishing an academy, and discussed his plan with the Rev. Richard Peters, whom he believed would be an appropriate leader for such an institution. Peters declined, and Franklin temporarily abandoned his plans. In 1749, Franklin revived his scheme, and gave notice of his project by reprinting Pliny’s letter on education in The Pennsylvania Gazette (24 August 1749). After raising the necessary capital, a board of twenty-four trustees was organized, and in November of 1749 Franklin was elected President of the new Academy. In 1753 it was incorporated, and in 1754 it was authorized to grant degrees. William Smith, author of the work which led to the establishment of King's College in New York, came to Philadelphia to join the new institution and, when it later became the University of Pennsylvania, became its first Provost. Rare—our records locate only two other copies at auction in the last century. REFERENCES Miller 470; ESTC W6822; Evans 6321; Hildeburn 1129 PROVENANCE Jo. Parker (signature on title-page)

View 1 of Lot 50: Benjamin Franklin | The work that led to the establishment of the University of Pennsylvania

benjamin franklin | the work that led to the establishment of the university of pennsylvania

Benjamin Franklin Autograph letter signed ("BFranklin") to William Strahan (“Dear Sir”), one page (244 x 191 mm) on a bifolium of laid paper (watermarked), Philadelphia, 3 July 1749, regarding the Library Company and various printing and publishing matters, integral leaf with autograph address panel (“To | Mr. Wm. Strahan | Printer | Fleetstreet | London” and direction “Per the Desire Capt Clark,” with three lines of accounting on verso; browned, especially verso of address leaf, seal tear and several marginal chips skillfully repaired with tissue, costing three words and portions of several letters, central fold reinforced with tissue. Half-brown morocco folding-case gilt, chemise. The business of printing and publishing. Franklin begins his letter with a summary of Strahan's "affair with Mr. Read." James Read, a neighbor and rival bookseller of Franklin's, had received a large consignment of books from Strahan in 1745. After three years had passed without any payment, Strahan gave Franklin power of attorney to pursue the debt. This Franklin did, but without much vigor, as is reflected in his present explanation to Strahan that he "shall have nothing to add on that Subject till I hear further from you. I acquainted you that he had given his Bond for the Ballance due to you, and that I do not look on the Debt as desperate." Franklin continues the letter in an accounting vein: "Enclos'd I send you several 2d Bills, having sent the firsts per Arthur.— I hope to hear per next Ship that you have reciev'd my Son's Pay, since I understand there was a [Bill] of Parliament in March last, for a Sum to defray all [the] Charges of the Canada Expedition. If it should prove otherwise, I will send the Ballance from hence in the Fall, and make you Satisfaction for the Delay & Disappointment." Franklin is evidently referring here to bills laid before Parliament by the Secretary at War for expenses incurred during King George’s War, including the charges for supporting the troops from Pennsylvania; William Franklin had served as a captain in the Pennsylvania provincial troops during this war. Turning to the more pleasant topic of books, Franklin reveals that he has recommended that the Library Company of Philadelphia retain Strahan as a book vendor: "The Library Company send to Mr. Collinson by this Ship for a Parcel of Books. I have recommended you to him on the Occasion, and hope you will have the Selling of them. If you should, and the Company judge your Charges reasonable, I doubt not but you will keep their Custom." Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and naturalist, was the Library Company’s first purchasing agent in London. Thinking of keeping current of competitors to Poor Richard—or searching for material for it—Franklin asks Strahan to "Please to send me a Book lately advertis'd; I think 'tis called a Collection of Sentences, wise Sayings, &c. by some Officer about the Parliamt. House, his Name I have forgot." (The volume in question was Charles Palmer's 1748 Collection of Select Aphorisms and Maxims, and Franklin did in fact appropriate for Poor Richard several aphorisms from it.) Franklin adds an interrogatory postscript in the left margin—"What is the Price [of] Printing Paper in London?"—before concluding, “With all our best Respects to you & yours, I am, Dr Sir, Your most obliged Friend & Serv[an]t.” REFERENCE Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, 3:381-82 (text reprinted from Works, ed. Bigelow, with many variations in capitalization and incidentals) PROVENANCE The Rosenbach Company (catalogue 8, 1776 Americana [1926], item 53) — Laird U. Park Jr. (Sotheby’s New York, 29 November 2000, lot 105; the present original was unlocated until the time of the Park sale)

View 1 of Lot 52: Benjamin Franklin | Recommending Strahan as the London book agent for the Library Company

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