Books & Periodicals

BOOKS, manuscripts and photographs from The Old Rectory, at Banningham in Norfolk, provided a separately catalogued section of a three-day March 21-23 contents sale conducted by Bonhams and represented 70 years of collecting by the owner, picture restorer Bryan Hall, and his father, the Rev. William Hall, who was at one time Vicar of Barton Turf and Smallburgh.

ONE notable item from the Bonhams & Butterfields sale of March 23 was a rare copy of Jacques Gautier d’Agoty’s colour printed Anatomie de la Tête of 1748 that made $19,000 (£10,220) – but not the top price lot, a Gershwin sketchbook that made $100,000, or indeed several other interesting items.

Though the catalogue did contain a selection of antiquarian and collectable books of a general nature, the March 31 sale held by Hampton & Littlewood of Exeter was notable for two specialised collections – the Ron Morris collection of magic lanterns, optical toys and related books and ephemera, and the collection of costume and fashion books formed by the late Janet Hill.

THE first day of the March 13-14 angling sale held by Mullock Madeley at Ludlow Racecourse was devoted to the literature of the sport. Seen right is one of two complete runs of The Creel from the years 1963-67 that sold at £200 and £210. A set of all bar one of the ...How to Catch Them series, all in dust jackets and all bar the Pike book first editions, sold at £460.

Edward Tyson’s Orang-outang, sive homo sylvestris: Or, the anatomy of a pygmiecompared with that of a monkey, an ape, and a man... was the first work to demonstrate scientifically the structural relationships between man and anthropoid ape and one which had a powerful influence on subsequent thoughts on man’s place in nature – albeit the orang-outang on which his work was based was actually a young chimpanzee.

A letter written and signed by Jean Harlow, which reveals an unexpectedly sensitive side to Hollywood’s original Blonde Bombshell, will go on sale at Byrne’s of Chester on Wednesday (March 31).

THE rarest and probably the earliest piece of printing in a February 26 sale held by Pacific Book Auctions of San Francisco, the papal indulgence from Wynkyn de Worde’s press seen right, was bid to $13,000 (£6890), but there were some other early items in the collection of editions of Aesop’s Fables formed by the late Dr Margaret Rose Quentin that opened the auction.

JUST two of the 600 or so lots that made up a March 2 sale of books and prints held by John Nicholson of Fernhurst, Surrey, managed four figure bids – a binding and a postcard album.

IT could have come straight out of one of the author’s own stories – a lost archive of unique material valued at two million pounds uncovered in the offices of a London law firm after being missing for decades.

A PORTRAIT of two of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’, illustrated right, topped this year’s sale of African-Americana at Swann’s when it was knocked down at $36,000 (£19,080). But there was also a bid of $20,000 (£10,600) on a group of 40 letters and telegrams addressed to Dickenson, Hill & Co. and S.R. Fondren, slave dealers of Richmond, Virginia, in the years 1836-62.

THE SPIRO collection, sold by Christie’s on December 3 included a few letters and documents of Spanish monarchs and a proclamation of July 1501, signed by both Ferdinand V and Isabella, that banned all unconverted Moors from Granada – the last step prior to the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain – was sold for £42,000.

LETTERS from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to members of his family are rarely seen on the market, but one lot in a Sotheby’s sale of December 9 presented no fewer that 40 letters and postcards addressed to his pianist brother Paul, among them some of the earlier known letters in his hand and, naturally enough, containing much on the subject of music. This lot found a buyer at £42,000.

BOUND in red morocco gilt, an autograph draft manuscript of one of the more important letters that make up the narrative of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise – Lettre XXI, in which Saint-Preux writes about the women of Paris – was sold for €82,000 (£56,550) as part of the library of King Léopold III and Princess Lilian of Belgium at the Chateau d’Argenteuil near Waterloo. The sale was held by Sotheby’s Paris on December 11.

Signed and inscribed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this short poem called ‘Fancy in the Clouds: a Marine Sonnet’ was written on a piece of seaweed and sent to Charles Lamb.

FINE weather helped the 43rd Stuttgart Antiquarian Book Fair welcome around 6000 visitors, up 20 per cent up on 2003, to the city’s Württemberg Kunstverein from January 23-25. The fair, staged by the Verband Deutscher Antiquäre (German Antiquarian Bookdealers’ Association) since 1962, is the largest of its kind in Germany – the 96 exhibitors included dealers from Switzerland, Austria, France, Israel and the UK (Bernard Shapero from London).

SOLD at Sotheby’s (20% buyer’s premium) for £10,500 on December 9 was a copy in modern limp vellum of the Epigrammata of Joan Latinus, a work that praises John of Austria for his recent victory over the Turks at Lepanto.

IN April 1912, Miss Lenox-Conyngham was travelling with three relatives from Southampton to Cherbourg, but though this was just a short channel crossing, she decided that it was worthwhile dashing off a letter to a nephew on the ship’s notepaper.

The title page of Hugh Maccaghwell’s On the Sacrament of Penance which, printed at Louvain in 1618, is recognised as “the first original work by a living author in Irish”. The few works printed in Irish that preceded it were the Bible, liturgical texts or translations of the works of others, but this was one of five works produced in the years 1614-18 at a press operated by the Irish Franciscans at St. Anthony’s in Louvain – the first press to print and promote Irish writing in the vernacular.

2004 is shaping up well for arts publishing, and publishers of books which cover the genre also reported excellent sales last year, particularly in the run-up to Christmas. Here, the Antiques Trade Gazette takes a look at some of the books on offer this year, many of which will be reviewed.

FAR from the traditional image of the stuffy bookseller, Mayfair-based Biblion, who deal in antiquarian books and first editions out of Davies Mews, W1, are celebrating St. Valentine’s Day with what can best be described as a sonnet-o-gram.