Books and Works on Paper

A crease that runs around the lower part of the dust jacket detracts somewhat from the appeal of a first impression copy of the first of Ian Fleming’s Bond books, Casino Royale of 1953, but it sold for £16,000 in a March 1 sale held by Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

Typewriters on which famous books came into existence have featured on these pages before, but not for some time – and certainly not machines of a kind that that continue to be used by their owner to this day.

Possibly the first printed reference to a ‘Great White’ shark attack is found in a four-page pamphlet, printed in Naples in 1721, from which the woodcut shown here is taken.

Crymogaea sive rerum Islandicarum… is a very rare history of Iceland by Arngrimur Jónsson, a scholar and teacher also known as Arngrimur the Learned.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning lots fall flat... but annotated Dorian Gray leaves treble the estimate

With BBC Radio 4 currently offering a season of programmes focusing on the Red Planet in fact and fiction, a couple of books from the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of Martian fantasies that made high prices in a recent US sale are an appropriate choice for these reports.

Cricket commentator who has a way with words offers books from own library at auction

Highly unusual, not to say confusing, but mathematically correct is the view of the world as seen in this untitled map of 1640 that made £4500 in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of March 1.