Lawrence and Burton triumph

Sold at £1100 was an 1835 [third?] edition of Sir John Soane’s Description of the House and Museum on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Field.... Illustrated with litho plates, this was one of just 150 copies of a folio work on the house and collection that he had bequeathed to the nation just two years earlier. Signed and inscribed to George Bailey, it had several pencil notes and corrections in the margins.

Bound in red cloth gilt, 15 volumes of a History of Northumberland published in the years 1893-1940 under the editorship of Bateson, Hinds, Hodgson and others, had been quite modestly estimated but on the day someone paid £1700.

Pictured above right: one of 50 signed copies of a specially printed, subscribers’ edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love that appeared in New York in 1920. In the original brown cloth gilt, it sold for £2400 in the Cheffins sale of December 6, where a scarce copy of the 1915 Methuen first of The Rainbow, again in original cloth, brought a bid of £640. Some 2500 copies of the latter were printed, but a court action taken under the Obscene Publications Act led to most copies of the edition being destroyed.
A slightly foxed second issue copy of the 1913 first edition of Sons and Lovers, in cloth gilt, was sold for $340.

Below right: this fine copy of W.C. Maughan’s account of travels in Egypt, Sinai, Arabia and the Holy Land, The Alps of Arabia of 1873, was sold for £500 in Cambridge, but the most expensive of the 19th century travel books was a first of Sir Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, the three vols. of 1855-56 showing some foxing in the original blue cloth gilt, now a bit bumped and rubbed at the edges. A scarce and famous work, it sold at £3600.

Francis Galton’s Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa of 1853 brought a bid of £420 the Hon. R. D. Murray’s Cities and Wilds of Andalucia, two vols. 1849, reached £300.
Cheffins, Cambridge, December 6
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent