It dispersed the library of a Leicestershire gentleman whose interest in 20th century British artists had led him to acquire an example of John Piper’s Brighton Aquatints of 1939. One of 55 copies, containing a dozen hand-coloured plates, it sold at £2400.
Leyburn on the map
On the following day, in Yorkshire, Tennants held its first sale of the year.
A letter in the hand of the soldier and politician George Monck, who served both the Commonwealth and Royalist causes, sold for £2500. This was a lot featured and described on the news pages of ATG No 2274.
Other highlights included, at £2800, the Robert Morden New Map of England…and Wales shown right.
Dated to c.1688 and bearing the name of a Dutch engraver, FW Oetjes, it is a map for which the saleroom could find no previous auction records and it suggests that it may have been issued to mark the Glorious Revolution and the accession to the English throne of William of Orange.
An 1860 first of Christopher Greenwood’s large-scale Map of the County of York, a coloured map on nine folding, linen-backed folio sheets with overall dimensions of a little over 6 x 7ft (1.86 x 2.16m) made £1200.
Oliver Byrne’s most famous publication is an innovative 1847 edition of Euclid’s Elements that aimed to simplify and explain the text by means of coloured symbols. Sold for £1400 in the Yorkshire sale, however, was a work by Byrne that is much less familiar but in the same colourful tradition.
This was an 1877 first of The Geometry of Compasses, or Problems Resolved by the Mere Description of Circles, and the Use if Coloured Diagrams.
A slim, unpaginated work in light blue cloth, it contains 36 numbered diagrams in all. LYON & Turnbull is another saleroom that regularly comes up with an early new season sale. This year it was held on January 14.
