Fresh-to-the-market material helped boost hammer prices well above estimates at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers' August 12 sale in Chicago. A Lewis & Clark book nearly quadrupled its high estimate.

The Fine Books & Manuscripts sale featured several highly-contested lots culled from private collections. Prices proved "an impressive upswing in the market for cartographic works and books with ornithological or botanical plates," remarked director Mary Williams.

Of note, two volumes from the octavo edition of John James Audubon's Birds of America, 1840, sold for $9,150, soundly surpassing the low estimate of $3,000.

From an extensive private collection of antiquarian maps and atlases was a rare first English edition of Gerard Mercator's Atlas, 1636, which garnered an impressive $35,380.

Leading the travel literature lots, a first printing of Lewis & Clark History of the Expedition...to the Sources of the Missouri fetched $46,360 (with buyer's premium) against a pre-sale estimate of $8,000-$12,000.