Sold at £850 apiece were a 1568, second edition of Gerard Legh's The Accedens of Armory in later calf backed boards and a 1610 edition of Thomas Miles' The Catalogue of Honor, or Tresury of True Nobility... of Great Britaine, illustrated with engravings and numerous woodcut coats of arms. The latter, which went to First Place Books, was in a broken period binding of gilt panelled calf bearing the royal arms and the initials T.P., perhaps for the barrister Sir Thomas Pennystone.
One or two items in the science and medicine categories have been held for another of my subject roundups, but sold at £1100 (Go, Little Book) was a 1599 second edition, in repaired and recased contemporary limp vellum, of Richard Percyvall's Dictionarie in Spanish and English that bore the ownership inscription of divine and mathematician Isaac Barrow, Newton's predecessor as the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. This second edition of Percyvall's dictionary, first published in 1590 as Bibliotheca Hispanica, was extensively revised by the lexicographer John Minsheu.
A 1730 first in contemporary mottled calf of the Abbé Charles Castel de Saint Pierre' Projet pour perfectioner l'Ortografe des langues de l'Europe, which uses the author's reformed spelling, made £600.
A 1649 first of John Lilburne's The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived, Asserted and Vindicated, a browned and cropped ex-Folger Shakespeare Library copy in modern calf-backed boards, sold at £850.
Lists of officials of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, were issued every year in Amsterdam from 1725 and a Batavian edition is known as early as 1751, but all early editions are scarce and the Batavian copy of c.1772 seen at Bloomsbury, in modern calf-backed boards, made £950 (Asher).
The seven albumen prints by John Thomson found in Visit of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh ... to Hong Kong in 1869 - a portrait and six views of the settlement, including a folding panorama of Government House - make it the first photographically illustrated book to be published in China. Thomson, who had arrived in Hong Kong from Singapore in the previous year and was soon illustrating The China Magazine with photographic prints, was commissioned for the present work by the Rev. William Beach, who noted that "the expense ...has of course been very considerably increased by their insertion", and it would seem that few copies were produced.
The only other copy that the auctioneers could trace in the past 25 years was the Hopetoun House copy, sold by Christie's Edinburgh in 1997. This one, in rebacked contemporary binding, had foxed and browned text and some of the prints were pale, but it sold at £3200 to the Nineteenth Century Shop.
