BEDFORD, N.Y. – A wide variety of objects from several prominent local estates crossed the block at Butterscotch Auction on July 11, including items from the estate of William D. Wixom (1929-2020), a well-known art historian who served as the chairman of the department of medieval art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1979 until his retirement in 1998. The top lot of the sale was a Royal Octavo edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America and The Quadrupeds of North America, New York and Philadelphia, 1840-44 and 1849-54, uniformly bound as one 10-volume set. Estimated $28/36,000, the set went out at $53,680 with the premium to a phone bidder. The set once belonged to the noted ornithologist John Eliot Thayer (1862-1933) and was sold with a bound catalog of Thayer’s collection, compiled by Evelyn Thayer and Virginia Keyes and privately printed in Boston in 1913. The set, along with other important books and fine bindings, came from the 30-acre estate of a Greenwich, Conn., family. A more extensive report on this sale will follow.