Hammer Time

This week Heritage Auction Galleries is offering sketches, finished line art, paintings, and signed books from the estate of illustrator Garth Williams. Up for sale are Williams’s pictures for Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and a couple of other books, one of which involved lots of bunnies.

Next week Sotheby’s will offer artwork from the collection of Kendra and Allan Daniel. The artists represented include W. W. Denslow, Frank Ver Beck, Fanny Y. Cory, E. H. Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, Jessie Willcox Smith, William Pène du Bois, Dr. Seuss, Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff, Ludwig Bemelmans, Johnny Gruelle, Lois Lenski, Eleanor Parke Custis, Tasha Tudor, Maurice Sendak, and many others. Plus some more bunnies.

Among those items is a John R. Neill illustration of Betsy Bobbin and Hank the Mule from Tik-Tok of Oz. It’s described as an ink drawing, but the gents at Hungry Tiger Press have said that Neill usually colored photostats rather than originals. But I’d accept it as a gift either way.