Books and Works on Paper

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Dictionary inscription is that of the crime novelist’s maiden name, adding to value.

Harry Potter just keeps on doing well at auction, and Hansons (25% buyer’s premium), which has enjoyed a particularly close and profitable relationship with JK Rowling’s creation over the years, had more to offer in a March 9 sale.

Polar material in a travel and exploration themed sale held on March 2 by Bonhams (27.5/25/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) produced a bid of £24,000 for a letter that Robert Falcon Scott wrote to a friend, Lady Goodrich, about his planned British Antarctic Expedition of 1910.

The elaborately tooled and richly decorated binding with its gilt inner dentelles shown right was made to contain an address ‘To Percy L. Pewtress Esq., Organist at Lee Chapel’, who had served the congregation of that south-east London church from 1883-1922.

Billed as the star lot in a sale that ended on February 27, a scarce copy of the 1937 first issue of Dandy made a high-estimate £3450.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

“It’s not often we offer for sale a library of nearly 200 volumes by the same publisher as a single lot – and certainly not one that fits in a small suitcase.”

Many of the lots in an Oxford sale of February 23 formed part of the estate of Canadian linguistic and literary scholar, the late ‘Paddy’ Docker-Drysdale.

Sold online at £5500 in a February 2 sale held by Catherine Southon (24% buyer’s premium) at Farleigh Court Golf Club in Surrey was a copy in full mottled calf gilt of the first European edition of the works of Confucius (551-479BC).

Running to 63 photographs, a virtually complete set of those produced for Carleton Watkins’ 1863 publication '…Photographic Views of the Falls and Valley of Yosemite' in Mariposa County, California featured in a January 27 sale at Nate D Sanders (25% buyer’s premium) of Los Angeles.

Our regular listing of upcoming British and Irish book sales.

Venetian edition of Commedia, lunar map and account of Polar voyages surface in Milan.

The best-seller at $400,003 (£296,300)* in a recent sale at RR Auction was a doubly signed receipt in which Johann Sebastian Bach acknowledges payment of the sum of five guilders under the terms of Sabina Nathan’s legacy.

Anonymous complete edition from 1696-97 is now recognised as the work of Mary Astell

Formed by a local man, the late Brian Ferguson, a collection of over 40 books issued by the Golden Cockerel Press featured in an auction held by Thomson Roddick (18% buyer’s premium) of Carlisle.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Nineteenth century aquatint and map provide global perspective in Gloucestershire saleroom

One of the stand-out lots at Sotheby’s New York (26/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) was a 1949 first printing of The Intelligent Investor.

This splendid example of the illustrative work of Edmund Dulac, a watercolour, gouache and ink drawing on paper, is his original artwork for one of the 28 plates he produced for a 1911, Hodder & Stoughton edition of Stories from Hans Andersen.