Trench and his Embankment – a panoramic first proposal

In what was probably the original binding of embossed and panelled calf over wooden boards, now worn and lacking some leather and the clasps, it was a 1613 second edition of the King James Bible, and despite lacking the last two chapters of Revelations and the map, it sold at £7600 to someone I can here identify only as a well-known Bible buyer.

A Lithographic Sketch of the North Bank of the Thames, from Westminster Bridge to London Bridge, shewing the Proposed Quay... is a panorama made up of 10 plates that extend to 17ft (5.18m) overall and are contained, along with a map (torn along the fold line) in the original wrappers.

There was some slight dampstaining to a few plates and the odd marginal tear, but complete sets of this 1825 project for a reconstruction of the Thames Embankment by Lt.-Col. Sir Frederick William Trench rarely survive complete and this one sold at £1000 (Beynon). A soldier and MP, Trench was a man of enormous energy and grand ideas, of which the Embankment was but the most important – although it was not until five years after his death, in 1859, that the first stone was laid.

Also the work of a Lieutenant-Colonel and sold at £1000 – this time to Goodes – was D.S. Dodgson’s General Views and Special Points of Interest in the City of Lucknow. Published in 1860, it contained an engraved map and 27 tinted litho views on 11 sheets, some with marginal foxing.

A scarce Mapp of the Kingdom of Ireland..., an outline coloured copy of a 32-section, folding map of Ireland by Henry Pratt and George Grierson, published c.1735, went to the Neptune Gallery at £1700.

When last a 1752 first edition of Christopher Smart’s Poems
on Several Occasions passed through the Hay salerooms, it was returned when the buyer insisted that there should be three, not two engraved plates by Hayman and Worledge. The auctioneer took the buyer at his word, but subsequent research showed that two was right, and last month the same copy, bound in contemporary calf, returned to sell at £360 (Autolycus).