This was one of the many private press and limited edition works that formed part of the collection of Derek Cottam offered in an October 15-16 sale held by Keys (20% buyer’s premium) of Aylsham.
Other works with this provenance included a ‘special’ copy of the 1936 Golden Cockerel edition of The Song of Songs illustrated by Lettice Sandford. In a half crushed green morocco and pictorial cloth binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, it too made a record sum at £2250.
Cottam lots also included, at £900, Richard Aldington’s Images of War, a Beaumont Press title of 1919 illustrated by Nash, and a 1937 Golden Cockerel edition of Paradise Lost, illustrated by Mary Groom and bound by Zaehnsdorf, at £1750.
A special copy of Barbara Bingley’s The Painted Cup, a 1935 Boar’s Head Press book containing an extra suite of Lettice Sandford’s wood engraved plates on vellum, made £500 among the Cottam lots.
The watercolour view of an attack by Spanish gunboats on Gibraltar from the journal of a naval chaplain, the Rev Andrew Lawrence – £3700 at Keys.
Sold for £3700 was a naval journal compiled by the Rev Andrew Lawrence, elder brother of painter Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Running to 150pp and including watercolours and drawings, it covers the years 1793-97, when Lawrence served as chaplain on both HMS Blenheim and HMS Britannia.
Worn and disbound, but something for which the cataloguer could find no auction record, was A Memoir of the Life of Admiral Nelson, printed in Norwich in 1801[?] and in its 19pp covering events up to the time of the first Battle of Copenhagen. It sold at £470.
However, at the end of the second day, the Norfolk lot bearing the highest estimate, a copy of PH Emerson’s famous 1886 photographic record of Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, valued at £40,000 or more, failed to sell.
