Past Sales

Since 1978, Lion Heart Autographs has sold nearly 20,000 fascinating, unusual, and valuable autographs. Some companies sell that many autographs in a year, but Lion Heart prefers the interesting and unusual over the banal; the rare and not the common; the unknown instead of the familiar. Some highlights include:

• A letter by Thomas Jefferson analyzing the effect of the French Revolution and another written to Thomas Paine
• A letter by Martin Luther King, Jr. mentioning his “I have a dream” speech
• A detailed, eye-witness account of the Battle of Waterloo
• The medical archive of the schizophrenic Empress Carlotta, the ill-fated wife of Mexico’s last emperor, Maximilian
• One of only a handful of letters by Antonio Vivaldi known to exist
• Rare examples of Louis Braille, Scott Joplin, Melvil Dewey, and I. M. Singer
• A rare example of Falstaff (formerly in the Morrison collection), the English soldier (and hero of Verdi’s opera) who fought Joan of Arc
• A remarkable set of songs penned by Franz Schubert
• Undiscovered drafts of Gershwin songs
• The original musical manuscript of the world’s most famous lullaby, “Rock-a-Bye-Baby”
• A collection of dozens of Albert Einstein manuscripts sold as a single lot for more than $1,000,000
• A unique collection of 325 artists’ letters, including three examples of van Gogh, illustrated letters of Cezanne, Gauguin and Renoir, and 120 letters by Monet
• Letters from Lafayette to Bolivar, Clara Schumann to Brahms, Washington to Franklin, Frederick the Great to Voltaire, Jung writing about Freud, Freud about Adler, and Einstein about Leonardo da Vinci
• A large archive of unpublished letters by Willa Cather
• The archives of Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Ned Rorem and George Walker sold to the United States Library of Congress and Emory University
• The archive of one of America's greatest folk singers, Judy Collins
• A collection of letters and manuscripts by the great choreographer Michael Fokine sold to Harvard University
• Unpublished letters of Hemingway to his last wife, sold to the Pierpont Morgan Library