Does a used Porsche seem like a fair trade for a rare 1555 book about medicine by Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius? No? Well, then, maybe you’re not as committed to tomes dedicated to medical matters as New York neurosurgeon Eugene S. Flamm, who is offering some choice publications from his shelves (some on medicine, some on other subjects) at auction at Christie’s as part of a sale of books and manuscripts, online now through January 28.
A professor and chairman emeritus of neurosurgery at Montefiore Einstein Medical Center in New York, Flamm unloaded his used Porsche 365B for $2,500 back when he was a resident in the city decades ago and in no need of a car. With the money, he bought a rare 1555 copy of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, a 700-page book that is a grail for collectors based on the aesthetic quality of its illustrations. It may have been the first text like it to include accurate accounts of the human body based on dissection.
“I got interested in Vesalius even in medical school,” Flamm said in a phone interview. “The head of neurosurgery was lecturing on some 16th-century figures. To me, the idea of knowing the background of whatever speciality you do makes sense. I have a friend who collects very early books on engineering and the management of water in cities. You wouldn’t believe how many books there are on that subject. I was already very interested in Vesalius and had a different version of one of his books before I did this crazy thing with the car.”
Historia naturalis, in Italian, Pliny the Elder, 1476. Courtesy Christie’s.
The top lot from Flamm’s holdings, estimated to go for up to $150,000, is a 1476 first edition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis in Italian. The house describes it as the first important scientific text to appear in print. Spanning 37 books, it treats subjects from mathematics and physics to medicine and zoology.
“That’s an absolutely gorgeous book, with the illuminated initial starting each chapter,” said Flamm, recalling when he got it for what he considered a bargain. “It was a rainy day in New York, and it auctioned at Swann, and the book just dropped dead. The estimate was $100,000, but I didn’t pay anything like that.”
Some of the books are illustrated, one of them by a top-flight artist: there is a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer showing cerebral ventricles in Ludovicus Pruthenus’s early contribution to neuroscience, Trilogium animae (1498), with a high estimate of just $12,000.
But even for an audience interested in art qua art, Flamm sees artistry in the ways the books are laid out, lack images though they may. Regarding the 1476 Pliny, he said, “It’s art but not as a picture. There’s the layout of the type, the mise en page. Look at the layout of the type that Nicolas Jenson developed. All the Latin fonts that we take for granted derive from that font, and this is a gorgeous example.” Duccio it’s not, he allowed (referring to the Sienese artist now showcased in a major New York exhibition), but it’s a killer object for anyone into books.
Other books also bear six-figure estimates. Tagged at up to $120,000 is a ca. 1475–80 edition of Aggregator sive De medicinis simplicibus (Aggregator, or Simple Medicine) by Jacobus de Dondis, a first edition of one of the earliest texts dedicated exclusively to medicine.
Expected to go for as much as $100,000 is Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s 1485 De proprietatibus rerum, a first Dutch edition of the book, printed by first printer of Haarlem, Jacob Bellaert, with 11 full-page, partially hand-colored woodcut plates, depicting God, angels, birds, plants, and other subjects.
A relative bargain is one of the illustrated books, Hieronymous Brunschwig’s 1497 Chirurgia, or Surgery, bearing a high estimate of $60,000.
Chirurgia, Hieronymus Brunschwig, 1497. Courtesy Christie’s.
“That’s a very, very important book,” Flamm said. “It’s one of the earliest descriptions of gunshot wounds in print, and the first work on surgery that has a whole series of illustrations in it.
“I belong to a traveling group, and one year we saw a copy somewhere in Italy,” Flamm recalled. “A dealer who was on the same trip said, ‘See anything you like?’ and I said the Brunschwig. Several years later, I got a call from this woman’s husband, also a dealer, who said he had been trying to reach me. I said, ‘Don’t tell me you found a copy of the Brunschwig!’” Indeed, he had.
While the art market has undergone a much-noted correction, experts observe the market for rare books only rising.
“We’ve certainly seen growing interest in this area,” said Heather Weintraub, a Christie’s specialist in books, manuscripts, and archives, in an email. Indeed, brokerage and investment banking firm Stifel Financial recently told the Wall Street Journal that upwards of $26 million in rare medical books have sold at auction in the last four years, whereas such texts had been tallying around $15 million a decade since the 1990s. And, said Weintraub, the medical books aren’t just of interest to medical pros, since any given book can be appealing based on factors such as illustrations or details of its binding.
Aggregator, sive De medicinis simplicibus,
Jacobus de Dondis, c. 1475–80. Courtesy Christie’s.
A year ago, a rare second edition of a classic textbook on the human form by Vesalius soared past its $1.2 million high estimate to sell for $2.2 million in an online sale of books and manuscripts at Christie’s. A retired Canadian doctor had bought the book at auction for just $14,000 in 2007.
By contrast, Flamm recalled a sale where the action was, literally, a bit sleepy.
“I was at an auction at Swann and was bidding on the first illustrated book on surgery, and I thought I had it at a great price, but a dealer who was interested had dozed off, and they reopened the bidding, and it got away from me.”
But he managed to make the best of that situation. He ran into the seller on the bus after the sale and ended up getting a coveted book from him as a result.
“So,” Flamm recalled, “there are always surprises that come along.”
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