Books & Periodicals

When Sotheby’s sold the second and third parts of Sotheby’s sale of the Jammes collection in Paris on March 21 and 22, the highest price was paid, as expected, for this exceptional collection of correspondence from the French father of photography, Nicéphore Niépce, and his son Isidore, featuring a heliographic reproduction of a Dutch print.

Above right: the ‘Library’ portion of the Ken Paul Collection, a three-day sale of ‘antique’ film props that raised £1.5m at Sotheby’s last month was not large and was dispersed in eight job lots, but someone will doubtless have fun sorting through this collection of several hundred deeds, wills, leases, probates, transfers etc., mostly on vellum and largely 19th century, but including a few made-up props.

The children’s books section of a Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale of March 7 amounted to no more than a dozen lots, but included several good things and a few interesting results.

Luxury sets were a feature of the Pacific Book Auctions sale of February 7 and seen left are sample volumes of a 48-volume set of the works of Alexandre Dumas, one of 1000 ‘Editions de Medicis’ sets published in Boston c.1900 and here sumptuously bound in dark green morocco gilt with red inlays to the covers, which reached $13,000 (£9155).

A high spot of the Sotheby’s sale of December 12 was a group of Jane Austen firsts in the original boards. Illustrated above right is the former Lady Shelley/Earl Spencer/Jerome Kern copy of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility of 1811, the blue boards with cream paper spines, which made $70,000 (£49,295).

WILLIAM Wood’s New Englands Prospect..., first published in London in 1634, was intended to “enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling Reader, or benefit the future Voyager”.

Though not so credited, this coloured lithograph, Grand Prix de l’A.C.F. 1913 (Motocyclettes) has a very Gamy/Montaut look about it. In the literature section of a motoring sale held by Bonhams at the RAF Museum, Hendon, on February 25, it sold at £250.

THE Roberts Holy Land offered in the 120-lot book section of this Kent sale at Mervyn Carey on 20 February, a six-vol. 1855 quarto edition, had been kept in a barn and had virtually disintegrated over the years.

THE COPY of Colonel William Fitzpatrick’s Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul... that sold for £380 in this Somerset sale at Greenslade Taylor Hunt on 13 December was not a great one.

The music sale held by Sotheby’s on December 7 contained two exceptional manuscripts – both of them presenting examples of the composer’s best loved works.

TWO LOTS were bid to £800 in the 150-lot book and map portion of this Hampshire sale on 6 February at George Kidner, which put them some way ahead of most others on the day.

BOOKS played a fairly minor part in the first Newbury antiques sale of the year at Dreweatt Neate on 30 January – one that raised in excess of £1.5m, a record for the Berkshire saleroom – but they did get the proceedings under way, and the very first lot in the catalogue, a misbound and now disbound and browned copy of Love in a Village, a comic opera as performed at The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden... showed the way in selling for a double estimate £200.

The estimate of £25-35 placed on a second impression copy of Tolkien’s The Hobbit was a reflection of its condition – “deplorable” being the cataloguer’s chosen epithet. There was no jacket and 20-30 leaves had been torn loose, one of which had been further torn into four (now three) pieces.

THE LAST 450 or so lots of a two-day general antiques sale on 6 December at Cheffins, Cambridge comprised books, many of them multiples.

THOUGH not a first class copy, a 1632 edition offered as part of this first Bath sale of the year at Bonhams was still a highly desirable and scarce item and brought the day’s top bid of £17,000 from Maggs.

PARIS: The Piasa letters and manuscripts sale on December 17 brought Fr7.25m (£690,000) hammer with just 1 per cent bought in, and no fewer than 18 pre-emptions for the Bibliothèque Nationale, Comédie Française, Assemblée Nationale, Musée Victor-Hugo, and the towns of Avignon, Grenoble and Besançon.

In October 1987, Christie’s embarked on a series of six sales to dispose of the Doheny library, a spectacular series of auctions that ended in May 1989 and raised a grand total of $38m – a sum that remains to this day a record for any library sold at auction.

ONE of only 50 copies of Proceedings of a General Court Martial.... for the Trial of Major General Arnold that came up for sale in a Swanns Americana sale of November 29 was ex-library, bound in later half morocco with assorted stamps and various defects, but this Philadelphia imprint of 1780 is an extremely rare and historically significant item and attracted a lot of interest.

ED GILBERT, a Californian book dealer, became a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs when he read The Gods of Mars in 1925, aged just 12 years. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to ERB by his elder sister, Florence, who in 1935 became the writer’s wife.

Blackamoor, Taunymoor, Suck a Bubby; Your Father’s a Cuckold, Your Mother told me ....not the most familiar of nursery rhymes, nor indeed one likely to find much favour in the present century, but that rhyme, illustrated right, is only one of 37 found in the second volume of Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, many of which are much more familiar, if not always in quite the same form as we know them now.