Artefacts including Bombing Flight Book and Mozart Manuscript Offered at Varied Auction

A Mozart handwritten manuscript, a flight book from the Hiroshima bombing and an excerpt from a Gutenberg Bible, as well as a cassock worn by Pope Francis are among a series of items up for grabs in an online sale by US-based Heritage Auctions.

Fifty-two lots are offered in the Historical Platinum Session Signature Auction, described as “500 Years of Human Innovation” and covers areas such as literature, science, and history.

“We’ll start with a Gutenberg bible leaf, so about 1452, down to material that went to the moon with Apollo 11,” said Samantha Sisler, special collection auction manager at Heritage Auctions.

The Gutenburg Bible was the world’s first large-scale printed book, of which only a few dozen parts have survived.

One of the top lots, with a bid of $400,000, is a log written by United States Air Force officer Captain Robert A. Lewis, one of the pilots of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb that was launched and used in warfare over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

“You have eight pages of his thoughts … hour by hour, minute by minute of exactly what happened … during the flight to Hiroshima,” Sisler said.

“And then they dropped the bomb. And he literally writes, ‘There will be a little pause while we bomb,’ period… It’s incredibly important… words can’t describe what you feel when you hold this thing in your hands. Something that witnessed the dawn of the nuclear age.”

Other lots relate to American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who disappeared in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, including photographs and letters, as well as a telescope belonging to the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh that discovered Pluto.

There are also draft works by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and working manuscripts by composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.

“They have corrections and notes … you can see their brilliance at work as they write, as they correct, change their mind and refine,” Sisler said.

She added that it was the first time Heritage Auctions, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, had brought together different specialities in response to the diverse interests of collectors.