Collectables

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

In the books, maps and prints supplement in ATG No 2341, Pom Harrington of Harrington Rare Books observed that millennials are now looking at books and thinking they are “cool”.

Two notable single-owner collections, augmented by items from the round of Oriental art sales, made spring a bumper crop in the specialist world of fans.

Advertising and souvenir fans from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries received a mixed reception at the April 10 Special Auction Services sale at Newbury devoted to works collected by the late Martin Willcocks.

Consisting of just two autograph leaves, but catalogued as “one of the most important fragments still in private hands”, a manuscript dating from the last years of Mozart’s short life topped a recent London music sale.

Bound together, first editions of both parts of the 1679-83 edition of Maria Sybilla Merian’s study of caterpillars and their transformation into butterflies, Der Raupen…, sold to a Danish bidder for €42,000 (£32,060) in a sale held by Ketterer Kunst (23% buyer’s premium) of Hamburg.

Early manuscript compilations for medical and culinary recipes feature quite regularly and successfully at auction, but an example in a recent London sale was one with a morbid statistical addition that achieved a treble-estimate £15,000.

St Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei (below) was penned to counter pagan claims that what had prompted the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410 was the adoption of Christianity by its emperors. The book was first printed around a thousand years later in the 1460s, but it was 150 years before a first English language edition appeared.

The Federalist…, a collection of essays first published in New York newspapers in the years immediately following independence, is today recognised as a seminal work on American political theory and a cornerstone of constitutional governance.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from June 19-29, 2018.

The parent company of recently launched Mayfair Philatelic Auctions has announced it will also be holding regular auctions of books and prints, writes Roland Arkell.

It was in December 2014 that Sotheby’s put an estimate of £100,000-150,000 on what it called at the time “probably the most famous and evocative illustration of the 20th century”.

A beautifully preserved 1937 first state copy of Tolkien’s 'The Hobbit' sold for £35,000 at Forum Auctions.

The Wassenaar Zoo in Den Haag opened its doors in 1937 and closed in 1985, but its wonderful library, essentially untouched since the 1970s, has only now come to auction in London.

Written in red ink on four sheets, the original draft script of Ronnie Barker’s famous ‘Fork Handles’ TV sketch of 1976 has been sold for £28,000.