Zoom–Selby Kiffer on “Bibliotheca Brookeriana”: Selling Sixteenth-Century Books in the Twenty-First Century

January Evening Program

Please join us at the Caxton Club’s January 24 evening Zoom program to celebrate Caxtonian T. Kimball Brooker’s extraordinary collection of Renaissance books and bindings. Currently up for auction at Sotheby’s in an unprecedented series of eight sales in New York, London, and Paris, the collection embodies Mr. Brooker’s passion for and scholarly knowledge of Renaissance books, their printers, binders, and provenance. Sotheby’s staff consider it one of the most significant and comprehensive rare book libraries to ever come to auction. Among its 1,300 volumes are works printed by Aldus Manutius, the Italian Renaissance scholar/printer who revolutionized printing in the early 16th century, and volumes created for Jean Grolier, “the Prince of Bibliophiles,” François I of France and the German Imperial Counsellor and merchant Marcus Fugger. Of particular note are eight gilt bindings produced in Mexico in 1594. What Mr. Brooker has assembled is not merely rare and exceptional but also considered to be unique outside Europe.

Guiding us through the “Bibliotheca Brookeriana” will be Sotheby’s senior vice president, Selby Kiffer, who has worked with Mr. Brooker to bring his collection to auction. Mr. Kiffer joined Sotheby’s in 1984 and has been involved in the sale of some of the most celebrated private libraries Sotheby’s has offered. He has also played a key role in the discovery and rediscovery of several bibliographic treasures, among them three previously unrecorded copies of the Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence and a lost fragment of the autograph manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 speech, “House Divided.” He is a frequent speaker to academic and bibliophilic groups and is a longstanding member of the board of directors of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.

Even if you can’t attend at the scheduled time, if you’re interested, please register. After the program, we’ll send an email to all registrants, asking if you’d like a link to the complete recording. That way you can see the program even if you couldn’t attend live, ran into technical issues, or simply wanted to watch it again.