Jay Dillon
Rare Books + Manuscripts

Jay Dillon  Rare Books + Manuscripts LLC is a private dealer of more than thirty years’ experience in and around New York, specializing in exceptional books, manuscripts, and cultural property. Jay Dillon has been responsible for selling or appraising more than $100 million worth of books and manuscripts spanning some three thousand years, including  a complete book of the Gutenberg Bible  the first edition of Don Quixote  three copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays  three copies of the first edition of Newton’s Principia and two related manuscripts  original watercolors by Redouté and Audubon  five sets of the Double Elephant Folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America  two of the twelve known copies of Poe’s Tamerlane  A Christmas Carol inscribed by Dickens to his sister for Christmas 1843  the blueprints for the Statue of Liberty  the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn  an unpublished Einstein manuscript on relativity  the earliest known monopoly-board made by Charles Darrow, 1932  Yuri Gagarin’s signed report on the first manned space flight  the first book on the Moon, 1969 In 1989 Jay Dillon was the editor and principal author of a catalogue that was hailed in the English press as “one of the ten best books of the year”. The firm maintains a wide and productive network of relationships both among private collectors and in the trade; and we are currently engaged in building a number of outstanding private collections for our clients: We have handled major American and scientific manuscripts, an important color-plate collection en bloc, and such obvious highspots as the first editions of Gulliver’s Travels, Jane Eyre, and all three books by Arthur Rimbaud printed during his lifetime; and we have been largely responsible for building one of the finest private libraries of Russian literature ever assembled in the West. We continue to work with the business-development staffs of most of the major auction houses. In 1994 Jay Dillon was invited to narrate the Discovery Channel program on the history of monopoly; and in 1998 he was consulted by the Zapruder family in connection with their famous film of the assassination of President Kennedy—which Mr Dillon valued more accurately than any other appraiser. The firm’s books and manuscripts offered to the public are mainly duplicates from our clients’ libraries, or otherwise surplus to their needs. Some recent examples are  all three books published by William James Sidis: The animate and the inanimate 1925, Notes on the collection of transfers 1926, and Collisions in street and highway transportation 1936; and even his rare Perpetual calendar 1929, a salesman’s sample-copy preserved in its original envelope addressed by Sidis in his own hand  the first edition of Gadsby: A story of over 50,000 words without using the letter e, by Ernest Vincent Wright, 1939 — a book of legendary rarity  the epochal paper on the molecular structure of DNA 1953, a presentation copy inscribed by Wilkins and signed by Watson, Crick, and Stokes  an amusing letter signed by Tom Lehrer, preparing the stage for an early ‘gig’, 1954  the first edition of Sir Roger Bannister’s memoir (1955) of running the first four-minute mile, signed by Bannister  a “delightful and moving book” presented to Jacqueline Kennedy in Ireland in 1955, by the priest whom she later asked to baptize her son  an extremely rare Autograph Scientific Manuscript signed by Richard Feynman; also the only inscribed first printing of “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman!” (1985) seen on the market in six years or more  a magnificent Zaehnsdorf exhibition binding, 1986 Jay Dillon  Rare Books + Manuscripts appraisal services include formal appraisals for insurance, estate-settlement, and tax purposes.