AUDUBON’S DOUBLE ELEPHANT FOLIO ON THE AUCTION BLOCK.
            Sotheby’s will auction a set of Audubon’s Double Elephant Folio in London on December 7.  It is expected to bring up to $9,200,000.  This would be a nifty coffee table item for Cylburn Mansion or Irish Grove.  Look … if 92 of us chip in just $100,000 a pop each it’s a done deal.  Shouldn’t be much of a problem.  Instead of making 6 trips to Antarctica help buy the thing.  A good chance for a tax writeoff.  A 1st edition of Shakespeare’s plays will also be for sale, billed as the most important book in the English language and expected to net $2,300,000.
            In 2000 an Audubon folio sold for $8,800,000 at Christie’s in London, the highest price ever paid for a book in the English language.  A fine monograph on this title, something of a rare book in its own right, is Waldemar H. Fries’ The double elephant folio: the story of Audubon’s “Birds of America” (American Library Association, 1973, 501 pages), which at the time sold for $47.50.  Audubon continues to be of compelling interest, with three major biographies published in 2004 alone, one of them by a Pulitzer Prize winner (but on a different subject).
            I think a lot of us are tired of hearing about Audubon, but look again at his amazing paintings, done under difficult circumstances.  Audubon was a skilled skater, fencer, tutor, dancer, salesman (especially with European aristocrats), portraitist, and, of course, hunter.  Apparently he was a charmer.   Recent writers maintain his reputation as a poor businessman is undeserved.  His  2X elephant folio prospectus, shown to potential subscribers, weighed 100 pounds.  There are supposed to be some 119 copies of the double elephant folio, most of them in libraries and museums.  I think the artist John Henry Dick owned one, kept at his South Carolina plantation.  
            Best to all. – Harry Armistead, Philadelphia.