The rare 1640 first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s Poems, selling for $25,875, despite lacking the frontispiece and five other leaves, was a highlight of PBA Galleries’ recent auction of rare books and manuscripts, featuring the autograph collection of Florence S. Walter, Part I.

The auction was conducted just days following the 38th California International Antiquarian Book Fair, and the select gathering of rarities from the Thirteenth through Twentieth centuries was available for preview by hundreds of antiquarian book dealers from around the globe who were exhibiting at the fair, as well as numerous collectors and scholars that attended the event. The results were outstanding, according to the auction house, prices were above the norm for the 191-lot auction. Sales totaled $283,234.

The first lot in the sale, a 1703 edition of Aesop’s Fables, illustrated with engravings after Francis Barlow, was a case in point. The copy formerly belonged to the Eighteenth Century naturalist Mark Catesby, with his ownership signature on the title page, and had been beautifully rebound in period style by Philip Dusel, but it was still somewhat surprising when it climbed above the $7/10,000 estimate to sell for $11,500. Soon to follow was a 1481 Italian edition of St Thomas Aquinas’ Super quarto libro Sententiarum with a beautiful illuminated opening leaf, the fifth lot in the auction, which sold for $4,888.

A 1703 edition of Aesop’s “Fables,” $11,500.

An account of the Spanish conquest of the New World, theRegionum indicarum per Hispanos olim devastatarum ofBartolome de las Casas, published in Heidelberg in 1664,illustrated with the graphic and somewhat disturbing engravings byTheodore De Bry of brutal Spanish atrocities, was bid to $4,600.Another account of the Spanish conquest, the rare 1632 secondedition of Historia verdadera de la conquista de la NuevaEspana by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, topped the estimate at$8,625 despite having the upper portion of the engraved title pageclipped off.

And an important Eighteenth Century work on the botany of Virginia, Flora Virginica exhibens plantas, by John Clayton and J.F. Gronovius, the 1762 second edition (which was the first to contain the map of Clayton’s travels), was hammered down at $5,463.

Rarities of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries also were sought after, and brought strong, and in a few cases, mind-boggling prices. Theodore Duret’s rare early work on the Impressionist movement, Die Impressionisten: Pissarro, Claude Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cezanne, Guillaumin, published in 1909 in an edition of 1,000 copies, with seven original etchings in addition to other illustrations, rose to $8,625, tripling the $2,5/3,500 estimate. A lovely little book from William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane, one of 365 copies, in a unique hand embroidered binding accomplished by the printer’s daughter, May Morris, stunned potential bidders on the floor and on the phone when it opened – and closed – at $10,350, far above the $1,2/1,800 estimate.

One of the high spots of American literature, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the 1885 first American edition in mixed state, sold well above its usual price at $9,200, due its exceptional condition.

“The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane,” from William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, $10,350.

Among other notable items in the auction were a rare 1824Virginia printing of The Whole Art of Book-Binding…,fetching $3,450; a pirated edition of Les TroisMousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas, printed in Brussels in 1844,the same year as the Paris first edition (and possibly precedingit), selling for $5,750; an 1818 Aesop’s Fables, illustratedby Thomas Bewick, with a fore-edge painting depicting the fable ofthe Fox and the Crow (one of a large selection of books withfore-edge paintings in the catalog), brought $1,495; AthanasiusKircher’s Mundus subterraneus, 1665, the first scientificattempt to explain the mysteries beneath the surface of the earth,with numerous copper-engraved maps and engravings, split theestimate at $10,350.

A beautiful illuminated manuscript Koran from the late Eighteenth Century, in a period painted boards binding, sold at $5,750; a rare booklet of four leaves by John Taylor, The Whole Life and Progress of Henry Walker the Ironmonger, 1642, being an early biography of a bookseller, found a buyer at $4,600; a handwritten bill signed by Sigmund Freud went at $2,588; and an eight-line handwritten fragment by Isaac Newton, mentioning devilry, though stained, sold for a respectable $5,750.

All prices include the 15 percent buyer’s premium.