Swann Auction Galleries is a Manhattan auction house founded in 1941 by book dealer Benjamin Swann and now considered the oldest continually operating specialist auction house in New York. George Lowry acquired the firm in 1970, and it is now led by his son Nicholas Lowry as president and principal auctioneer. Swann specializes in antique and rare works on paper, running more than 35 catalogued auctions a year through dedicated departments covering books, autographs and manuscripts, maps and atlases, photographs, prints and drawings, vintage posters, illustration art, and African American fine art; it held one of the first American auctions dedicated to photographs in the 1950s.