Books & Periodicals

FOR the third successive year, dealers from the UK’s two major antiquarian bookselling organisations, ABA and PBFA have combined forces at the Edinburgh Book Fair which this year takes place on March 23 and 24 in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms.

LONDON-based specialist book auctioneers Bloomsbury Auctions enjoyed a successful inaugural sale in Rome on December 6 where a total of €801,000 (£545,000) was realised.

The Museum in Docklands have acquired a rare and significant archive of 18th century papers highlighting London’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

JOHN Taylor was the Sawrey joiner and wheelwright, whose wife and stout, elderly daughter, Agnes Anne, kept the village shop immortalised by Beatrix Potter in Ginger and Pickles. But the first Taylor to appear in one of her books was his son, young John, who was the model for the terrier carpenter John Joiner in The Roly Poly Pudding.

MISSING Book Fairs, named after the fairs’ eponymous organiser, Chris Missing, are moving one of their six events from one stately home to another.

POLICE have confirmed they are committed to tracing over 40 rare books stolen from Manchester’s Central Library after a senior judge demanded that greater efforts be made to recover them.

Thieves broke into Goldsworth Books & Prints some time between 5pm on Saturday and 9am on Sunday July 29-30, stealing books, maps and prints to the value of over £30,000.

Four Beatrix Potter watercolour Christmas cards, recently discovered in a Wiltshire attic, will be sold by Highworth, Swindon auctioneers Kidson-Trigg on September 20. The cards have been consigned by descendants of the original recipients, Elizabeth (1888-1977) and Elinor (1886-1979) Lupton.

IT set a British auction record for a Shakespeare First Folio and made the highest price ever seen for a printed book at Sotheby’s London (20/12% buyer’s premium) – but hushed voices at the back of the saleroom were suggesting that the £2.5m hammer price represented pretty good value for a near-perfect copy of the most important book in English literature.

OF the many publications generated by Captain Cook’s exploits in the Pacific, the most curious is surely A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth Collected in the Three Voyages of Captain Cook to the Southern Hemisphere...

IN what must be one of the least surprising private treaty sales negotiated, The Martin Luther King Jr Collection will go to Morehouse College, Dr King's alma mater in his home city of Atlanta.

Compiled in the second half of the 15th century, the Fechtbuch of Hans Talhoffer (fl. 1435-82), the most celebrated and experienced fighting-master of the age, is a veritable encyclopaedia of medieval combat.

AN unseen and apparently unique collection of photographs, letters and maps that illuminates the campaigns of Field Marshall Montgomery in the Second World War has emerged at Kent auctioneers Watermans.

CAPTAIN Thomas Bowrey’s principal claim to fame has been as the author of a 1701 English-Malay dictionary. Despite criticism of its clumsy errors, eccentricities of transliteration and quaint dialogues, this remained a standard reference for over 100 years.

IT was a case of sweet and sour as two headline-grabbing London auctions came to an end before a bid could be raised last week.

Before embarking on his 1907-09 expedition to the Antarctic, Ernest Shackleton sent Ernest Joyce and Frank Wild on a crash course in printing and had a press and associated materials loaded onto the Nimrod.

FROM a Hampshire cupboard find to “missing link” scientific discovery of a generation. A manuscript minute book kept by Robert Hooke during his years as Secretary to the Royal Society has rapidly and rightly been elevated to scientific sacred relic and national treasure.

IN contemporary brown calf and buff coloured boards, a good, unsophisticated copy of the 1781, Riga first edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critik der reinen Vernunft was sold for $8500 (£4505) in a March 28 sale held by Baltimore Book Auctions.

LAST week’s ATG included a short piece on a 1566 poem by Patrick Adamson, giving thanks for the birth of a son to Mary Queen of Scots, that made £3100 in a Dominic Winter sale of April 6.

Thanks to a lively book trade and the introduction of new departments, turnover at Bloomsbury Auctions has increased by 38 per cent in the first quarter of 2005 compared to the same period in 2004.