Book

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.

The bird with the splendid hairdo pictured right is one of five original watercolours, possibly by Madam Knip herself, found in a special copy of Temminck & Knip’s Histoire naturelle des Pigeons of 1801-11 that sold for £30,000 to a private buyer at Christie’s November 28 sale.

The earliest book in English on the subject, and described by H.D. Molesworth in his introduction to a 1960 reprint as “a work of art in its own right... as readily accepted for its literary content as for its technical information”, George Parker and John Stalker’s Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing... was the book that effectively introduced the process to Western craftsmen and one that had, as a consequence, a dramatic effect on decorative styles and fashions.

The Frederick B. Adams Jnr. library of English & American Literature was sold by Sotheby’s on November 6 and 7. The second day was devoted entirely to Adams’ magnificent Thomas Hardy collection, but among the highlights of the general sale was an inscribed presentation copy of the 1923, first English edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, illustrated right, that sold at a higher than expected £80,000 to Peter Harrington.

The Ashendene Dantes that sold for £7000 as part of the book section of this general antiques sale at Dreweatt Neate on 10 October were formerly in the library of Sir Frederick Handley Page, founder of the aeronautical firm, and sold at £3500 was his copy of the 1906 Ashendene edition of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia.

Several auction records were broken when Christie’s New York sold the library of Abel E. Berland in an October 8-9 sale that saw 90 per cent of lots sold for a premium-inclusive total of $14.4m (£9.8m).

There were few plate books in this year’s Arts of India sale at Christie’s, held on September 27, but one notable result was provided by Emily Eden’s Portraits of the Princes & Peoples of India, published by J. Dickinson in 1844.

Pictured are two modern firsts, both in rather chipped jackets, from the book section of a September 7 sale held by Mallams of Oxford. P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in Springtime of 1939 was sold for £100, while Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop of the previous year reached £210.

ISAAC WARE’S Complete Body of Architecture, a calf bound 1768 edition illustrated, or rather “adorned” with engraved plates of “...plans and elevations from original designs... in which are interspersed some designs of Inigo Jones”, was one of a small group of architectural books that brought most of the higher bids in this Bearne's sale on 21 August.

Depicting the balloons of the Montgolfier and Charles brothers, as well as Blanchard, Lunardi and Garnerin, this folding colour frontispiece plate comes from an anonymously published little volume entitled

AMONG the earlier travel books in the June 14 sale held by Pacific Book Auctions was a 1632 first edition of Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s famous first-hand account of the conquest of Mexico, Historia Verdadera de la Conquesta de la Nueva-España. An ex-Nottingham Free Library copy in a 20th century quarter morocco binding, it had stamps to the title and other pages and a few other shortcomings of condition, but it is an important work and sold at $5000 (£3625).

THERE WAS no competing with Harry Potter in the Sotheby’s sale of July 10, and bidding rose to £75,000 for Thomas Taylor’s original illustration for the the book that launched those wizard tales in 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but Beatrix Potter did her bit too, as did Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, W. Heath Robinson, E.H. Shepard, Lawson Wood, Ronald Searle, Dr Seuss and others.

UK: Sold for £48,000 to Quaritch at Christie’s on June 4& 6 was a recently rediscovered manuscript of William Gilpin’s book on Forest Scenery... (first published in 1791) that fills four volumes and contains 25 full and 20 half-page watercolour drawings by Gilpin, plus three pencil and wash drawings of animals by his brother Sawrey.

An incomplete copy of one of the masterpieces of English botanical illustration of the 19th century, Mrs Edward Berry’s Selection of Hexandrian Plants (1831-34), offered at Christie’s on June 4 & 6 contained only 45 (of 51) of the younger Robert Havell’s partially colour-printed and hand-finished engraved and aquatinted plates, but it brought a bid of £60,000 from the Oppenheimer Gallery.

A single leaf from a 1455 Gutenberg Bible, in a copy of Alfred E. Newton’s A Noble Fragment of 1921 sold at Bloomsbury Book Auctions on June 8 for £15,000 (+ 15 per cent buyer's premium).

More selections from the early summer auctions.

JUST two days after moving operations to new premises at Coleridge House, Shaddongate, Carlisle, the recently retitled firm Thomson Roddick & Medcalf celebrated with a special book sale and took a bid of £17,500 for one of the privately printed subscriber copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom issued in 1926.

USA: INCUNABULA offered as part of the April 26 sale of Early Printed Books at Swanns were not in the Friedlaender class, but the top lots did include two books from the press of Gunther Zainer, Augsburg’s first printer.

UK: A key feature of the Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale of April 5 was a private collection of the works of A.A. Milne.

In a Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale reported earlier (Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1485, April 21, 2001) I mentioned a bid of £2800 on a 1930 (German text) Cranach Press edition of Hamlet, but at Sotheby’s on April 5, as part of the John Gielgud Collection, a copy of the English text version made very much more than that.