Books & Periodicals

Fans of Lord Snooty and his Pals, Big Eggo, Morgyn the Mighty and dear Contrary Mary were drawn to the Comic Book Auctions sale of September 13 by the appearance of a good copy of the very first issue of the Beano.

Florence’s longstanding Antiques Fair, the ‘Biennale Internationale dell’ Antiquariato di Firenze’, opens next week in the city’s 17th century Palazzo Corsini, running from September 26 to October 4.

Sent for auction by a local lady who had been gifted it some 20 years ago, a late 19th century Koran ensured that the latest book sale at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood was their most successful ever.

An impressive collection of pictures, studio pottery, furniture, personal effects and letters has been consigned to auctioneers Mitchells of Cockermouth from the estate of Mary Burkett, former director of Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal.

The Battle of Waterloo bicentenary has sparked a number of special auctions and dealer shows.

Only a year before the centenary of the Easter Rising, a powerful letter by the Anglo-Irish diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger David Casement (1864-1916) has surfaced in South Africa.

Only one other major George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) manuscript has come up for auction in the last 40 years, so Stargardt in Berlin can be assured of an international audience for the extensive autograph work they will offer on March 24-25.

On March 29, 1833, John Constable gave his daughter Emily a copy of Isaac Watts’s book ‘Songs, Divine and Moral’.

Sold at Sotheby’s for £900,000 last month was a rare copy of a work that marks the beginning of printing in English.

The ‘piece of paper’ waved by Neville Chamberlain on his return from meeting Hitler in 1938 must count as one of the most infamous documents in history.

Book dealers have been urged to be on the lookout after a second edition of the King James Bible from 1614 was stolen from a Berkshire church.

This bizarrely dressed young man is the 23-year-old Alfred Hitchock, the film director who went on to make Psycho, North by North West, The Birds and Vertigo.

An item with an interesting local connection which is for sale at this Saturday’s Norwich Fleamarket is a rare Victorian large folio of European brass rubbings collected by a Norwich cleric.

The book of hours known as The Rothschild Prayerbook sold for $12m (£7.55m) at Christie’s in New York.

The most expensive printed book sold at auction will go on display to the public after the buyer pledged to lend it to libraries across the US before putting it on permanent loan at one of them.

Cheshire auctioneers Adam Partridge set a house record when this newly discovered copy of the Passover Haggadah written and illuminated by the celebrated 18th century scribe Aaron Wolf Herlingen sold for £210,000.

The entire contents of a West Yorkshire bookshop containing over 30,000 books are to go under the hammer with the bidding opening at just £1.

Little did “the Reverend Dr Walter Blandford Warden of Wadham Colledge” of Oxford University realise that one day his name would have such significance in the world of newspapers.

Cheshire auctioneers Adam Partridge have discovered a copy of the Passover Haggadah written and illuminated by the celebrated 18th century scribe Aaron Wolf Herlingen in Vienna.

The University of London is reported to have cancelled plans to auction off a rare set of four early Shakespeare folios to raise funds for further acquisitions.