Poe, Einstein, and Newton Letters and Manuscipts Headline RR Auction’s 'Remarkable Rarities' Sale
Poe's letter to poet and and historian Thomas Warren Field
Handwritten works by Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton plus a landmark Nicolaus Copernicus volume and an Edgar Allan Poe letter lead RR Auction’s annual Remarkable Rarities event on September 20.
The 1948 six-page handwritten draft in German by Albert Einstein for The Essence of the Theory of Relativity article in volume XVI of The American Peoples Encyclopedia explains his theory of relativity (estimate: $200,000) including a hand-drawn graph, and is accompanied by a full English translation.
A significant single-page manuscript reveals Isaac Newton’s private, anti-Trinitarian views, considered heretical in his day and punishable by death. In it, Newton explores the nature of Christian worship, concluding that Christ was to be honored as a man and king, not as Almighty God (estimate: $40,000).
Other highlights include:
- the second edition of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium/On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres which first set forth a comprehensive heliocentric model of the cosmos, incluing the influential Narratio prima of Georg Joachim Rheticus, Copernicus's disciple (estimate: $200,000)
- Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary archive of materials (estimate: $200,000) sent by him to editor-in-chief of the China Mail Thomas H. Reid, including a signed manifesto declaring “China for the Chinese,” a signed portrait, and a rare inscribed first edition of Kidnapped in London
- an Edgar Allan Poe autograph signed letter written in 1845, the year he published The Raven, in which Poe invites fellow poet and and historian Thomas Warren Field, best known for his Essay Towards an Indian Bibliography reference book, to his Manhattan boarding house (estimate: $60,000)
