In the early part of last year, Christie’s Mid-West regional office in Chicago was contacted by St Mary’s of the Barrens, a Vincentian mission and seminary in the small Missouri town of Perryville that had been the home many years of a parallel
collection of books and manuscripts (as well as paperweights and decorative arts) formed by Estelle Doheny over much the same period – the 1930s and ’40s.
As was the case with the St John’s Seminary of Camarillo, California, whose decision to sell off the Edward Lawrence Doheny Memorial library brought the main collection to auction, the Perryville Mission had decided that the Doheny bequest should be sold to fund their missionary work – in this instance in Kenya – and in due course another thick red hardback catalogue was added to the reference shelves.
Illustrated there is the sale’s top lot, an exceptional example of the King James Bible that set an auction record in selling at $380,000 (£271,430) to H.P. Kraus. Contained in a beautiful late 17th century English binding of dark green turkey gilt, this copy (last seen at auction in 1946 at Parke Bernet, as part of the Frank Hogan library), is an example of Robert Barker’s 1611, first (or ‘He’) issue of the King James Bible – one of the most important books in the English Language – and one of only a few to have the general title printed with a woodcut border, rather than the more familiar engraved version. Opinions differ, but it may be that these were the first copies.
King James Bible in a restoration binding sells for $380,000 in the ‘Perryville’ Doheny auction
In October 1987, Christie’s embarked on a series of six sales to dispose of the Doheny library, a spectacular series of auctions that ended in May 1989 and raised a grand total of $38m – a sum that remains to this day a record for any library sold at auction.
