Book

PRESENTER and interviewer Jeremy Paxman, pictured right, has agreed to be the patron of this year’s Antiquarian Book Fair, which will be held at Olympia in West London from June 9 to 12.

BOOKS, playbills and pictures from a collection formed by the late Gerald Tyler, an amateur actor and producer with the Leeds and Bradford Civic Theatres, founding chairman of the British Children’s Theatre Association and a man who was active in drama education, formed part of a January 8 sale held by Rowley Fine Art of Ely.

A prayerbook presented by Louis XV to Maria Leczinska as a wedding present in 1725 sold at Sotheby’s (23.92/14.35% buyer’s premium) for €280,000 (£200,000) on December 2, during an otherwise disappointing 194-lot royal provenance sale that brought €1.26m (£900,000) and was 72 per cent sold by value, but just 56 per cent by lot.

Containing several hundred pencil drawings, a Spanish chemistry textbook used by Salvador Dali during his student days at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid was sold for $12,000 (£6280) in a Sotheby’s New York sale of December 3.

SOLD at £42,000 to a collector in a November 30 sale of Continental books and manuscripts held by Sotheby’s was a 1566 Lyon edition of Celsus’ De re medica from the library of France’s ‘Prince of Poets’, Pierre de Ronsard. Autograph material by de Ronsard is of the utmost rarity, with just two documents entirely in his hand recorded (both in the Bibliothèque Nationale) and ony two or three volumes bearing his signature, as this one does, remaining in private hands.

FIRST printed by Berthelet in 1531, Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Govenor, a treatise on the education of statesmen that was dedicated to Henry VIII and found great favour at court, has been described as “not only the earliest treatise on moral philosophy in English but the first of an imposing array which introduced into England the cultural and political ideals of the renaissance”.

ANOTHER Greek author whom Aldus published was Aristotle, whose Opera Omnia appeared in a five-part, seven-volume edition between 1495 and 1498.

IN the competitive world of domestic tablewares, the name of Spode has remained among the very best since production started c.1770.

ESTIMATED at £500-600 in a Keys of Aylsham sale of September 24 but very much the lot that attracted most interest – and a final bid of £10,200 – was the New Testament seen right.

IN rebacked and refurbished contemporary calf, the copy of Hobbes’ Leviathan... seen at a Dominic Winter sale of August 25 was a 1651 first edition, but both the engraved additional title and main printed title were cut down and relaid, the folding table was torn and repaired and there was some browning and dampstaining.

SOLD at £1650 in a July 6 sale held by Lawrences of Crewkerne was a group of ten volumes, mostly in contemporary full or half calf, that were grouped under the heading ‘Scandal’.

IN a 19th century binding of blue straight grained morocco, a 1548, first English language edition of Bishop Edward Fox’s The True Dyfferes between ye regall power and the Ecclesiastical power, translated from Fox’s 1534 Latin original by his friend and admirer, Henry, Lord Stafford, was sold at £1400 in a July 6 sale held by Lawrences of Crewkerne.

SOLD for £2200 (C.R. Johnson) at Bloomsbury Auctions on August 19 was a Batchelor’s Directory.., a work. of 1694, which goes on to describe itself as ...a treatise on the excellence of marriage; of its necessity, and the means to live happy in it: together with an apology for the women against the calumnies of the men. Bound in contemporary red morocco gilt, this first edition was catalogued as “a dedication copy from the author”, but to whom, we are not told.

AN escaped slave who became a prominent social reformer, journalist and public official, Frederick Douglass (1817-95) published a first account of his life in 1845, but revised and extended versions followed in 1855 and, finally in 1881 as The Life and Times...

BOUND in full calf, a 1579-80 edition of John Kitchin’s The Authoritie of al Justices of Peace... was sold for £700 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

IT was a third edition of 1799, slightly foxed and browned and lacking the half titles, but the copy of George Walker’s novel The Vagabond seen in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of August 19 was in a contemporary calf gilt binding and it sold at £400 (C.R. Johnson).

BOUND in contemporary panelled calf, a 1704 first of An Historical & Geographical Description of Formosa..., the two folding engraved plates (of 16 in all) torn but skilfully repaired, realised £600 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

INSCRIBED in both volumes “with the author’s love” to an Edith Barnes, presentation firsts of Lewis Carroll’s over-long children’s story Sylvie and Bruno of 1889 and its continuation or conclusion of 1893, the original red cloth bindings now uniformly faded to the spines, dampstained to the front of Vol. II and showing repairs to the spine ends of the first volume, was sold for £1400 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of July 15.

WITH the frontispiece and all but the last of the 34 double-page or folding engraved plates and plans in full contemporary colour, Isaac Commelin’s Histoire de la Vie & Actes memorables de Frederic Henry de Nassau, Prince d’Orange of 1656 sold for $32,000 (£17,580) in a Christie’s New York sale of June 9.

RIGHT: one of 23 coloured aquatints by George Hunt after M.E[gerton] that make up Airy Nothings; Or, Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-cum-Shorts; in a Circumbendipus Hop, Step and Jump, by Olio Rigmaroll, a slim quarto volume of 1825, this one shows ‘Quadrille Dancing at Mr Owen’s Institution, near Lanark’ – the model community established by social and education reformer Robert Owen at the New Lanark cotton mills.