The latter appears to have been written by the same 17th century hand throughout, but someone has added the names of Mr Sherrard and Mr Baxter and the saleroom suggested that the former could be Robert Sherrard.
Sold at £460 to a private buyer was a 1650 (posthumous first?) edition of John Rogers’ A Godly and Fruitful Exposition of the Epistle of Peter, 1650, in a contemporary calf gilt binding. Rogers, another puritan divine and for over 30 years the vicar of Dedham in Essex, was known as “one of the most awakening preachers of the age”.
A bid of £1000 came from Lachman for a 1638 Cambridge Bible, illustrated with engravings by W[illiam?] Marshall that was somewhat stained throughout and in a contemporary vellum binding, now broken at the upper hinges, and assorted highlights from the other 300 lots in the catalogue begin with the work of yet another clergyman.
A collection of nine works by William Gilpin, mostly his descriptions of picturesque Britain in later editions of 1808-09, but uniformly bound in six volumes in 19th century half roan, was bid to £680 by the Hay Cinema Bookshop.
Mathew Habershon’s The Ancient Half-Timbered Houses of England of 1836, illustrated with 36 litho plates, at £220 (Castle Hill) and a complete, three volume set (in contemporary green cloth gilt) of D.H.S. Cranage’s Architectural Account of the Churches of Ancient Shropshire, 1901-12 sold at £430 (Malvern.
A good 1885 first of Robert Louis Stevenson’ wonderful A Child’s Garden of Verses, partly untrimmed in the original cloth gilt, was sold at £700 to the Poetry Bookshop
Y Gelli, Hay-on-Wye, September 6 Buyer’s premium: 14 per cent
Sermons are Awakening
THEY LIKE a good sermon in this part of the world and in this September sale, a 1611 (seventh or eighth?) edition of the sermons of Henry Smith, a puritan divine who was known as “silver-tongued Smith”, and whose collected wisdom first appeared in print in 1592, sold at £320 (Humber) in a binding of contemporary calf gilt, while a 350pp manuscript collection of sermons, this time bound in 19th century calf, made £1100 (Lachman).
