The 1608 edition printed in Madrid by Juan de la Cuesta for de Robles, seen right was the third to appear in the capital and the seventh overall - though as it is widely believed to have been revised by the author, it is of considerable textual significance.
Slightly dampstained in the early pages and with a library stamp on the title page, the copy in 17th century vellum seen at Sotheby's on November 30 was bid to £70,000.
The second part of Don Quixote was not issued until 1615 and few sets comprising first editions of both volumes are known. Many were probably made up at a later date. The history of the work's publication is complex but very few copies of that 1605 first edition are recorded, some incomplete, and fewer still firsts of the second volume.
Institutional collections hold the majority of these early editions, but in December 2000, a superb copy of the so-called 1605 second Cuesta edition, in a 17th century French morocco binding bearing the arms of Charles de Valois, duc d'Angoulême, was sold pretty much as expected for £200,000, while the following lot, a copy of that 1615 second volume, partly loose in a contemporary Spanish binding of limp vellum, confounded the valuers but underlined its scarcity by selling for £220,000 where just £40,000 had been predicted.
The most spectacular ... Don Quixote result, however, came in the 1989 Sotheby's New York sale of 'The Garden', when the Pellot-Huth-Pierpont Morgan copy was sold for $1.5m - then just short of £950,000. In red morocco extra gilt by Francis Bedford, that exceptional copy offered firsts of both parts.
The November 30 Sotheby's sale of Continental books and manuscripts also saw a bid of £28,000 for an unpublished letter in the hand of Francisco de Goya. Addressed (in 1789?) to his good friend Martin Zapater, a Zaragoza merchant, it is very different from his official correspondence and relates principally to his son's smallpox, which prevents him returning to work as court painter until the quaratine period has elapsed. It also includes a small sketch, possibly a humorous self-portrait, as part of his signature.
