Dating from c.1475, it featured eight full-page miniatures with full illuminated borders, along with elaborate initials and other pictorial ornamentation to the text pages.
It sold for a low-estimate £15,000 in the auction house’s Dorchester rooms, but a much larger sum, £46,000, was needed to secure something very different: The Hobbit.
A first-impression example of 1937, this copy of Tolkien’s famous tale was said to be the property of a Dorset family of title.
Published in that same year, one of 200 copies of a Golden Cockerel Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost made £1700. Featuring wood engraved illustrations by Mary Groom, it was in the original Zaehnsdorf binding.
