Collectables

Putting a third major collection of highly specialist and highly priced material onto the market within little over three years might seem to be asking too much of a limited number of wealthy enthusiasts.

Billed as “the world’s most valuable illustrated book”, the ex-Duke of Portland set of Audubon’s Birds of America offered by Christie’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was sold for $8.3m (£6.24m), a price only once bettered at auction.

In 1930, Jonathan Swift’s 18th century satirical book Gulliver’s Travels was republished by Cresset Press with a suite of illustrations by the British artist Rex Whistler (1905-44).

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.