The Alphabet of Genius: Important Autograph Letters and Manuscripts

The Alphabet of Genius is one of the most important libraries of autograph letters and manuscripts to have been offered for sale in recent decades. The breadth and range of subjects and authors it contains, from Mozart to J.R.R. Tolkien, from political philosophy to the history of opera, are truly remarkable, functioning as a living record of the history of Western thought and culture over the past four centuries or more. 

This landmark sale is a clarion call to autograph collectors old and new: not for years has there been such an opportunity to acquire letters and manuscripts in the hands of our most famous authors, artists, scientists, musicians and thinkers.

Literature is brought to life in manuscripts and letters by Dickens, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Edward Lear, W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, Kipling, Kerouac, Zola, Proust, Flaubert, Pasternak and many more; poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, Tennyson; and drawings by E.H. Shepard and Antoine Saint-Exupéry. Despatches from the studies and laboratories of the scientists whose discoveries shaped our world are here: from Halley, Herschel and Edison to Einstein, Darwin, Leibniz, and Pasteur.

The extraordinary selection of artists’ letters ranges from one of the earliest lots in the sale – a letter written to Michelangelo by his pupil Antonio Mini in 1531 – to a veritable Who’s Who of the artistic great and the good of the 19^th and 20^th centuries: Pissarro, Gauguin, Monet, Matisse, Delacroix, Degas, Schiele, Munch, and more; female artists are represented by Berthe Morisot and Georgia O’Keeffe; and Paul Signac contributes a drawing of a stunted tree.

Music echoes from the pages of manuscripts by Mahler, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Liszt, Puccini, Elgar and John Cage, and the composers’ letter are crowned by a dramatic letter from Mozart before his marriage to Constanze, with a fascinating pendant piece in an autograph account by his pupil Thomas Attwood of his acquaintance with the great composer.

Finally, the History of Ideas section encompasses not just philosophy, but runs to political thought and psychoanalysis: from Jeremy Bentham to Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung.

Lots 1-199 will close on 14 December; lots 200-365 will close on 15 December. The sale will begin to close at 11am on both days, with lots closing at one-minute intervals.

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