Important catalog from Christie's sale of the St. Mary's portion of the Doheny Collection.  This catalog includes 154 paperweight lots in full color, plus another 211 lots of other decorative objects from the collection.  Some lots have more than one paperweight.  These paperweights were collected over 50 years ago and had not seen the market since before World War II.

Estelle Doheny (1875-1958) did not start collecting paperweights in earnest until after the death of her husband in 1935.  Guided by dealer C. W. Lyons of New York she built her very impressive and high quality collection over the next ten years.  Most of this took place in the years before the publication of the first book on Glass Paperweights by Evangeline Bergstrom in 1940.  There is one book published on the collection by Gayle - Paperweights.  I have copies of this book in stock and also copies of the auction earlier catalog from the St. John's Seminary sale.

Doheny lived in Los Angeles and was fearful of damage to her collections (books, furniture, paperweights, and other decorative arts) due to the threat of Japanese bombing and invasion during World War II.  She dispatched many of these to St. Mary's for safekeeping.  At the end of the war she retrieved them, had custom displays made for 176 of the paperweights and returned them permanently to St. Mary's Seminary.  I don't know if all 176 are included in the auction, but almost all are.  The other 244 paperweights in Doheny's collection were given to St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California.  They were auctioned off by Christie's on February 3&4, 1988, 30 years after Doheny's death.

The catalog is one of the newer series of catalogs which include high quality color pictures of every lot.  It is an important catalog of a very important collection and belongs in every collectors library.  It includes the prices realized for each lot.  The highest paperweight was lot 152, a spectacular Clichy bouquet paperweight which sold for $17,625. 

8 1/4" by 10 1/2".  127 pages.  Soft bound.

Click on the picture to see an example of one of the inside pages.