Books and Works on Paper

Large numbers of lots identified only as folders, boxes and albums full of prints, watercolours, maps and so on offered in a Brightwells (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of July 5 included one disarmingly catalogued, in full, as ‘Sketches, Watercolours, Prints of Naked Ladies, chiefly’. It sold at £500.

‘L’Abbé Quille’ (shown below), against whose leg a dog is seen relieving itself in the illustration, is one of 84 hand-coloured plates – 12 each of seven subjects – that make up a French magic trick book of c.1799 sold for £2900 by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) in a June 19-20 sale.

Leading a 75-lot Brontë collection sold by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 10* was a set of two of the novels written by the sisters in the hugely productive years of 1846-47.

Handsomely bound, a set of Gould’s Birds of Britain offered as part of the small but select Dorros ornithological library at Christie’s New York sale of June 15 failed against a $60,000-80,000 estimate, but in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of the previous day a very differently presented set brought a mid-estimate £36,000.

“With the exception of Dürer’s Apocalypse, the most influential woodcut programme from Germany was that of the Cologne Bible of 1478-79.”

Bid to £5000 at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was a 1593 first of Thomas Fale’s 'Horolographia. The Art of Dialling'.

Sold for €62,500 (£54,825) by German auction house Kiefer (20% buyer’s premium) in a June 30-July 1 sale in Pforzheim was an 1867, Hamburg first edition of the first volume of Karl Marx’s 'Das Kapital'.

Purchased at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the ‘Industrial Exhibition of All Nations’ jigsaw type game shown here sold for £1350 at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) on June 16.

An extraordinarily rich and varied crop of book sales have taken place this summer.

A superb suite of the original ink and gouache drawings – one shown here – made by Carl Otto Czeschka to illustrate a 1908 edition of Die Niebelungen dem Deutschen Volke sold at $290,000 (£224,805) in a Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) sale of June 6 called Important Design.

Translated from a Paris version that had appeared earlier in that same year of 1535, an 8pp German newsletter giving an account of the execution of Thomas More sold for $11,500 (£9055) as part of the Eric Caren archive at Christie’s New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 15.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s much-loved tale of The Little Prince was first published in New York in 1943, with Reynal & Hitchcock issuing it in both French and English versions.

Sold by RR Auction (25/22.5% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was a financial document of November 1721 bearing the signature of Isaac Newton – an order to pay to a Dr Francis Fauquier the dividend due on his substantial investment in the South Sea Company.

The Charles Dickens Birthday Book, edited by his eldest daughter, Mary, and illustrated by his youngest, Kate, was published in 1882, 12 years after the writer’s death.

A 1610 first of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, a foundation work in modern astronomy, sold for €320,000 (£278,400) on June 15 at Minerva Auctions (25/18% buyer’s premium) of Rome.

Marc Lescarbot’s Nova Francia… of 1609 is an account of French settlements in North America and what we now think of as Nova Scotia and Canada. It predates the more famous first accounts of Champlain’s voyages and discoveries by three years.

In ATG No 2292, I noted as a record the £13,000 sale of a copy of Thomas Wright’s Original theory… of the universe… (1750), as part of the Christie’s April 26 sale of the Beltrame library.

Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica is one of those rare epoch-making works, a publication that changes everything in its field and sets a standard for others to emulate.

A June 16 sale at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne included theological works from the library of Edward Tottenham (1810-53), a cleric whose parishes were in Bath and Wells.

A further selection of children’s annuals from the Brenda Butler archive, characterised as usual by superb condition, provided some of the highlights of a May 2 sale at Comic Book Auctions (16% buyer’s premium).