Two lots offered examples of papers on DNA published in Nature magazine in the early 1950s and those by Crick and Watson, signed by the two men, sold at $15,000 (£12,000) and $19,000 (£15,200).
Also very successful in the Californian sale were two scarce works on economics.
Sold for $2500 (£2000) was a 1930 first in rarely seen dust jacket of Irving Fisher’s in-depth analysis of the previous year’s Stock Market Crash – and After. It was signed by a Japanese economist, Hisatsune Sakomizu, who was later responsible for analysing economic conditions in Japan at the end of the Second World War.
Bid to $6000 (£4800) was a 1934 first (second issue, for overseas sales) of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd’s Security Analysis: Principles and Technique.
It is one of the more influential books on investing ever published and one that has remained in print ever since.
Also part of the PBA sale was a 1907 first of Is Mars Habitable?, a work described by its publisher as “a critical examination of Professor Percival Lowell’s book ‘Mars and its Canals’ with an alternative explanation”.
It was the work of a man whose name is usually linked with that of Darwin for his contemporary work on evolution theory, Alfred Russel Wallace.
In this much later work he effectively and scientifically debunked Lowell’s theories about what he believed to be canals and an irrigation system built by intelligent beings and the presence of liquid water on the planet’s surface, which Wallace showed would be impossible.
