LANDMARK WORKS
BETWEEN TWO COVERS

PREVIEW OF THE BOOKS & AUTOGRAPHS AUCTION ON 17 SEPTEMBER 2025

The good thing about books is that they seem to have an answer for everything. For centuries, people in search of facts or fiction have turned to the printed word. Two caveats are worth remembering, however: first, the meaning and guidance a book offers can point in radically different directions depending on the author; second, there are questions that no text — however comprehensive — can truly address.

Take the Apocalypse, for example. How are we to imagine the end of the world? This is where art steps in. Because a book can contain anything, it allows artists to grapple with the unsayable and translate it into images. Two remarkable visions of the end of time are featured in our autumn Books & Autographs auction. In Hartmann Schedel’s famous Weltchronik (Nuremberg Chronicle) of 1493, the message is clear: at the end of the ages comes the Last Judgment, and the Dance of Death levels all social hierarchy. Max Beckmann, by contrast, strikes a different tone. Created in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, his Apokalypse suite reflects on humankind’s capacity to turn the world into a living hell.

HARTMANN
SCHEDEL

Four centuries separate the late Middle Ages from modernity, and they produced countless extraordinary books. A few particularly beautiful and valuable examples from our September auction also deserve mention here.

For centuries, travellers naturally relied on printed atlases. An atlas opened the world and laid out the routes between countries and continents. But what, exactly, is an atlas? Simply put, it is a compilation of maps with explanatory texts, invented by Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) in the last third of the 16^th century. Ortelius had the idea of engraving sea and land maps to a uniform format and uniting them in a single volume.

First published in 1570, the work made the knowledge of the finest geographers of its day accessible to a wider public. Ortelius succeeded in presenting the world to his contemporaries as if on a stage. Executed as scientifically as the era allowed, the atlas is also aesthetically compelling, adorned with mythological figures and embellished with nautical instruments and ships. The copy offered in our auction was published in 1612 and contains the most extensive set of maps found in any Ortelius atlas.

Equally epoch-making is another work: Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, published in London in 1687. We are honoured to present one of the most influential scientific books of all time, further distinguished by a fascinating Swiss provenance. Readers will find the full story in our printed auction catalogue, as well as the catalogue online.

This diagram from Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica shows the trajectories of projectiles (orbits) under the influence of gravity, and illustrates how bodies move according to their initial velocity. Newton thereby demonstrated that the same force (gravity) that makes an apple fall (or in this case a cannonball) also keeps the Moon in its orbit.

It marked the first time humanity realised that the same laws of nature apply both on Earth and in the heavens.

'Perhaps the greatest intellectual stride that it has ever been granted to any man to make'. (Einstein)

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