Journal

Cambridge University Library has launched a public appeal for help to locate two missing notebooks from its archive – including one with Charles Darwin’s famous 1837 ‘Tree of Life’ sketch.

Decades in advance of Britain’s Slave Emancipation Act of 1833, 275 British men, women and children attempted to settle an African island to prove plantations could be run without slavery.

THIS watercolour sketch comes from a remarkable 120-page First World War journal penned by Lieutenant Kenneth Edwin Wootton of the 1/21 Battalion, London Regt Tank Corps.

A PENCIL and watercolour sketch showing men at work on a celebrated escape tunnel was a major attraction in a log or record compiled in 1943-45 by a Scottish P.O.W. sold by Lyon & Turnbull of Edinburgh for £3200 on January 13.

A DIARY kept by a sailor in Nelson’s navy was offered for sale in a US auction earlier this month. Given that diaries kept by ordinary sailors are exceptionally rare, there was huge interest in this visually striking document from both sides of the Atlantic with institutions, the trade and private collectors vying for the journal.

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

THE portrait of John Davis seen right – if it is indeed the man after whom the straits between Greenland and Baffin Island are named – was far and away the earliest of the Arctic lots on offer, but not the most expensive.

LAST month, 14 notebooks containing the gruesome diaries of Anatole Deibler, France’s last public executioner, were sold in Paris at Beaussant-Lefèvre (17.94% buyer’s premium) for €85,000 (£55,600).

Sold for £180 as part of a Hamptons sale on August 1 was the handbill exhorting Englishmen! to take up arms against Napoleon, right.

UK: AS well as a quantity of letters, journals and sketch albums written or compiled by R.M. Ballantyne – among them an album containing sketches made on excursions to Scotland and fishing trips to Norway in the 1850s, which sold at £1000 to David Miles – the Bonhams (Buyer’s premium: 15/10 per cent) sale contained an 1858 first issue of Coral Island, the publisher’s decorative blue cloth binding slightly worn but generally good, which made £4000 (Heritage).

UK: ONE of a group of seven newspapers, plus a printed edict, issued in March 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian revolution, which sold for £400 (Hanson). They were apparently distributed free in the streets of Petrograd and these copies were acquired by Gertrude Hitchcock, who was there working for a British engineering company at the time.