Inscribed by the author to Irene Hancock, it was accompanied by two unused but seemingly related postcards.
Another of the day’s bigger surprises was a bid of £2000 on an undated, small octavo volume in broken boards called Homan Turpin’s Brief Description of England and Wales.
The county maps it features, according to Yasha Beresiner’s British County Maps, comprise a 1773 re-issue of a pack of playing card maps originally issued in the previous century by Robert Mordern.
In Turpin’s later version, writes Beresiner, “…the suit marks were removed… making them effectively useless to the potential gambler, and each county had a detailed accompanying text, giving the county’s history, topography and other relevant information”.
A locally printed work of c.1816 titled A Short Treatise on the Use of Globes, for Mrs Ratchet’s School – Pt.II, bearing a Totnes imprint and still in the original wrappers, sold at £400.
It is to be hoped that those enrolled at her Academy for Young Ladies did at one time have access to the first part.
In original printed card covers, With Winston Churchill at the Front by Captain X, an unusual and now rare (but quite recently enlarged and reprinted) item of Churchilliana published in 1924, was sold by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood at £240. The author was Andrew Dewar Gibb, later a professor of law at Glasgow University and a founder member of what is now the SNP, who during the First World War was a fellow officer in the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers in which Churchill served.
Kelmscott Press work
Featured on the sale's catalogue cover, a Kelmscott Press work of 1892, one of 300 copies of William Morris’ own A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson in the original limp vellum, sold at £1550.
Showing a lean to the text block but complete with dust jacket and containing two letters exchanged by its author and the consignor, a 1972 first of Richard Adams’ Watership Down took £1300.
The stand-out successes in this sale, a first of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and a rare, early-19th century work of science fiction, The Mummy! by Jane Webb, featured in ATG No 2409.
A frontispiece by Felicien Rops for one of 50 copies Alfred Delvau’s Dictionnaire Erotique of 1864 sold at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood inExeter for £450. The imprint, inventive one imagines, states that this third (?) edition was printed in Freetown for the Bibliomaniac Society.
