The copy of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs of 1933 lacked the frontispiece, but it was a signed presentation copy and still managed a bid of £310, while two of Cecil Aldin’s dog books of that period, a signed presentation first in somewhat soiled cloth of Sleeping Partners of 1929, featuring the adventures of Micky the Irish Wolfhound and Cracker the English Bull Terrier, and Just Among Friends of 1934, the latter in a tatty jacket, reached £290.
A pair of late vintage W.E. Johns firsts, Biggles and the Black Mask (1964) and Biggles and the Gun Runners (1966), both in jackets, sold at £190 and a 1975 first edition of one of Seamus Heaney’s most popular collections of verse, North, complete with an attractive dust jacket that has a stylised image of a Viking ship on the front cover, made £260.
Marc Chagall’s The Jerusalem Windows, as first published in Monte Carlo by Andre Sauret in 1962 and containing two original lithographs of the windows that the artist designed for the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre Synagogue, was sold at £640.
The Anglo-Saxon book was the Kent historian, William Lambarde’s Archaionomia..., a paraphrased collection of Anglo-Saxon laws that was first published in Canterbury in 1568. The Aylsham copy was a 1643 second edition in rebacked calf and it sold at £180.
A 1664 first edition, in later calf binding, of John Evelyn’s Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees... showed some marginal worming, but sold at £480.
Sold for £280 was a group
of five C.F. Tunnicliffe firsts in dust wrappers, comprising My Country Book (1942), Bird Portraiture (1945), Our Bird Book (1947), Mereside Chronicle (1948) and Shorelands Summer Diary (1952).
One item of particular local interest, Stone’s Norfolk bridge book, is pictured and briefly described right.
Others included Edward Pococke’s Old Norwich of 1896, which apparently contains over 200 watercolour views and sold at £1100, while one of 175 copies of Patterson & Smith’s 1903 study of Charles H. Harrison, Broadland Artist was sold at £410, and one of 100 special edition copies of W.F. Dickes’s 1906 book on The Norwich School of Painting made £370.
A near complete run of the publications of the Norfolk Records Society for the period 1931-73, together with Norfolk Archaeology for the years 1928-45, all in original wrappers, sold at £840 and a volume containing issues of the Norwich Mercury for the years 1805-07, much of it featuring the exploits of a famous son of Norfolk, Horatio Nelson, sold at £460.
An 18th century work on London is noted above, but other regions had their moments and an 1891 first of The County Seats of Shropshire, edited by Francis Leach and here bound in tree calf gilt, sold for £180, while Northamptonshire Families of 1906, edited by Oswald Barron, sold well at £200.
Chagall, Disney and Heaney – a mixed bag!
AS EVER, this Norfolk sale on 14 September at Keys, Aylsham provided an eclectic mix of stock, from the seriously antiquarian to the frivolous, from a 16th century summation and translation of Anglo-Saxon laws to a famous tale of porcine practicality.
