Hollywood actor, dialect coach's massive rare book collection goes on sale- in round 2- tomorrow

Robert Easton got stuck playing rubes and hayseeds in 1950s and '60s films, stuck as he was with a pronounced West Texas accent.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 1961

Frustrated by typecasting, he studied phonetics University College, London after moving to the UK with his English wife in 1961. When they returned to Hollywood some years later, he set up shop as a dialect coach for the studios, and became the go-to buy for teaching actors how to sound like their characters. In his New York Times obit, Margalit Fox wrote:

For more than 40 years Mr. Easton reigned as the entertainment industry’s dean of dialects, sought after by actors needing to lose an accent, or gain one, sometimes in the few frantic hours before a critical audition. “The Henry Higgins of Hollywood,” he called himself, and the description was apt: Mr. Easton could get his own larynx around at least 200 different accents — ethnic, historical, regional, sociological — with little to no study. 

His profession was not for the faint of heart. A few years ago he was awakened in the dead of night by a series of long-distance telephone calls; through the line came the menacing voice of Idi Amin. But the caller was merely Forest Whitaker, Mr. Easton’s pupil, who was phoning — in character — for some last-minute instruction while filming “The Last King of Scotland” in Uganda.

Without doubt, Mr. Easton’s greatest triumph came when a student, the Japanese actress Yoko Shimada, won a Golden Globe for her nuanced English-language performance in the 1980 mini-series “Shogun” — despite the fact that she did not actually know a word of English.

During decades of touring the globe on film locations, Easton spent his spare time rooting through old bookstores. When he died in 2011, at 81, he left a collection of over 500,000 volumes.

Fine Books & Collections reports, 

Some of the fruits of those collecting labors went to auction on July 25 at Addison & Sarova Auctioneers in Macon, Georgia, sold as group and shelf lots, mostly at bargain prices. Part II of the sale, featuring singular rare and important items, such as several incunabula, early editions of Erasmus, and a first edition of Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), is scheduled for November 7.

That first sale presented some novel issues:

This sale was, auctioneer Michael Addison commented via email, “sort of an experiment in shelf-lots. Typically, shelf-lots are sold on-site only, no catalogue, no shipping, no online bidding, etc. In truth, it isn’t worth an auction house’s time to do it any other way because bulk creates a lot of work and isn’t worth all that much. We wanted to see what would happen if we catalogued and photographed them and treated them more like the higher-end material.” For the most part, that strategy worked well, with the house seeing a 96 percent sell-through rate, and dealers outnumbering collectors as buyers. Five lots fetched more than $1,000 including premiums, with the top lot (five volumes on Russian proverbs) selling for $7,200 to an online bidder from Russia.

The final lot of the summer sale was marketed as “The Mother of All Shelf Lots!” and comprised “around 100,000 books” still at Easton’s North Hollywood home. The auction house suggested this was very likely the largest single lot ever offered at auction. Between the sale announcement and the date of sale, however, the family sold some of the consigned books to other buyers, causing Addison & Sarova to withdraw the lot. The family is reportedly finalizing an agreement with a dealer to purchase the remainder.

One book, in tomorrow's sale, hasn't been on the market in 82 years:

One of the major highlights is an incunable--a book printed with moveable type before 1501. This one was actually printed in 1475, in Basel. It is Speculum sapiencie beati Cirilli episcopi..., a medieval book of Latin prose fables by Cyrillus. What makes this edition special, other than the lovely, hand-painted historiated initial seen here, is the fact that no other copy has been recorded at auction since 1933. This one was formerly owned by book collector and American military attaché to the UN, Victor De Guinzbourg, before his widow sold it to Easton. The estimate is $5,000-7,000.