Copies of Loggan’s Oxonia Illustrata... (1675) and Cantabrigata Illustrata (1690), uniformly bound in period tree calf but with the upper cover of the Oxford volume detached and that for Cambridge apparently lacking two plates, but containing an extra plate of St. John’s, sold at £2900 and £3700.
Bound in library cloth but with only a school library bookplate to indicate its previous service and entirely free of stamps to Bradbury & Evans’ 51 coloured, nature printed plates, an 1857 edition of Thomas Moore’s The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland was sold for £1600.
Bearing fulsome descriptions on separate pages to Tony Hamilton by the author, Mary Hayley Bell, the director of the much-loved 1961 film, Bryan Forbes and the producer, Richard Attenborough, a 1958 first in chipped dust jacket of Whistle Down the Wind was sold at £500 and something rather more recent – and so far only staged, not filmed – a 1995 first of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, was sold at £1050.
On the origin of a couple of Austens
BOUND in half calf gilt and marbled boards, the three-vol., 1813 second edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that sold for £4600 in a May 21 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst bore the pencil initials H.D. for Horace Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son) and his bookplates were to be found in a copy of the 1818, four-vol. first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in a similar but less well-preserved binding that sold at £2500.
