The West Sussex saleroom found buyers for over 90% of the lots and and raised over £105,000 in all.
Sold at £9000 was a partly illuminated 1484, Venetian edition of Dante’s La Comedia with the commentary of Christophoro Landino. Now in a modern but old style calf binding, it was once part of the Strozzi family collections and later resident in London’s Athenaeum Library.
Printed in Mantua
In a gilt-lettered pigskin binding produced in 1905 by Katherine Adams for CH St John Hornby, a volume featuring some of the works of St Thomas Aquinas, as edited by Ludovicus of Cremona and printed in Mantua in 1474 or earlier, made £7000.
The Padeloup binding made for a 1761 edition of works by Ovid, sold for £2600 at Bellmans.
Another lot that did much better than predicted – at £2600 rather than the suggested £200-300 – was a 1762, Italian language, illustrated edition of the Epistole Eroiche of Ovid in a fine binding by Antoine Michel Padeloup, or Padeloup le Jeune.
Bid to £5000 was an 1821 first of Robert Willis’ Attempt to Analyse the Automaton Chess Player, an exposure of that famous fraud involving the ‘Mechanical Turk’ – a work that previewed in the special Books, Maps & Prints supplement published with ATG No 2491.
Also bid to £5000, and in this case a much, much higher than expected sum, was a three-volume set of Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity, the various parts dating from the years 1839-55.
