Collectables

EIRE: WHYTES of Dublin held their spring coin sale on February 23. Their regular sale results are very useful for gauging the market in Irish material and with the enhancement of the Irish economy in recent years there is much interest in it. This is made manifest by the fact that most of the buyers reported by Whytes are resident in Ireland.

UK: THIS elaborately gilt violet cloth binding on an 1861 first edition of Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne was identified by Sotheby’s as Carter’s B ‘Presentation Binding’ but their view on the value of this copy – which had all edges gilt but was fragile at the hinges and partially split in Vol. III – was a modest £600-800.

FRANCE: THE largest hoard ever of gold Celtic coins – the French call them Gauloise – is being offered at auction in Paris on March 27. The expert is Alain Weil (54 rue de Richelieu). There are 145 of them and they were issued by the Gaulish tribes of the Cenomanes, who bequeathed their name to present-day le Mans, and the Venetes who dominated the area round Vannes on the south coast of Brittany.

UK: I THINK I am right in saying that no James Bond book, at least no uninscribed copy, has ever before reached five figures at auction, but the Dominic Winter sale of March 7 added that required extra nought when an absolutely splendid copy of Ian Fleming’s first Bond spy story, Casino Royale of 1953, was bid up to £11,400. There was stiff competition from several London dealers, but in the end it went to Bromlea & Jonkers.

UK: WRITTEN in Daniel Defoe’s characteristically neat hand, this is one of only nine recorded examples of his autograph verse, and though small creatures have nibbled into this copy of his poem, Of resignation, seven of those other verse specimens are in the celebrated Defoe notebook in the Huntington Library and the other is in the Portland Collection at the University of Nottingham, leaving this as the only example still in private hands.

UK: A 1632 MANUSCRIPT plan by Johan Williams of the Maniera de Monk Lytons, alias Kentwell... in the Suffolk parish of Melford, executed in ink and watercolours and including details of Kentwell Hall and Melford church, sold for £2000, in this East Anglian sale, and other local lots included a three-year run of the Norwich Mercury (1801-04) at £500 and A.H. Patterson’s Broadland Scribblings of 1892, at £480.

UK: ILLUSTRATED here are three more selections from the recent sale of the Ronald Segal Collection at Sotheby's English Literature & History sale held on December 14.

In a recent issue some attempt was made to get away from only reporting past auction sales by noting coins from trade fixed price lists. To develop this theme further we return to auction sales but with a difference, this time to preview a few lots from Spink’s sale of April 11 in London.

UK: THE FORMER Arpad Plesch copy of Sir Joseph Hooker’s 1855, first edition of Illustrations of Himalayan Plants which was sold for £19,500 in this Nottingham sale was featured in last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette (Issue No. 1480), but there were a few other interesting results in the natural history section.

UK: Early spoons seem to be one of the most buoyant sectors of the silver collectors’ market at present, which is fortunate given the rate with which collections are landing at the rostrum.

UK: FRESH on the market, reasonably estimated and of undoubted quality – but three silver dessert baskets offered at Somerset still provided a surprise when, as has happened elsewhere, the ‘right’ piece of silver exceeds all expectations.

UK: TWO LIBRARIES that I fondly imagined we had seen the last of were represented in this recent South Kensington sale.

UK: THIS 1564 Venetian edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia was the first to incorporate the commentaries of both Landino and Vellutello, which, printed in roman type, surround the italic setting of Dante’s text.

UK: POSTCARDS were responsible for the highs and lows of Bonhams' 512 lots of collectors’ items at Honiton. Two multiple postcard lots provided the highlights while the section also accounted for half of the 50 or so unsold entries.

UK: THREE more selections from the Ronald Segal library which was auctioned off in Sotheby’s English Literature & History sale held on December 19.

UK: TWO more selections from the Ronald Segal library which was auctioned off in Sotheby’s English Literature & History sale held on December 19.

UK: THREE more selections from the Ronald Segal library which was auctioned off in Sotheby’s English Literature & History sale held on December 19.

UK: A POTENT combination of nostalgia and rarity lay behind the £12,000 paid for the poster pictured here in Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) annual ski poster sale on February 22.

UK: IN A richly gilt and inlaid green morocco binding by Bayntun Rivière, a copy of the 1894 Kelmscott edition of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon – an ex-Beeleigh Abbey lot with William Foyle’s red morocco bookplate – was sold at £1700 (Shapero).

UK: THE title page of a 1613, first complete edition of Galileo Galilei’s Istoria e Dimostrazioni..., containing his observations on the sunspots and his discoveries relating to the rotation of the sun – the first to contain Scheiner’s letters to Welser – which, bound in contemporary vellum, made £4500 (Quaritch) as an ex-Fort Augustus lot.