Latest News Articles by Ian McKay
Colourful life of Jane Austen
28 August 2017Pictured here is 'Fanny was obliged to introduce him to Mr Crawford’, an ink and watercolour version of an illustration made by Hugh Thomson for an 1897 Macmillan edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Catalogue clues to library riches destroyed by fire
28 August 2017A blaze which tore through Norwich Central Library one August morning in 1994 destroyed thousands of historic documents and more than 100,000 books.
Fine bindings from Spain and England
28 August 2017Eight fine bindings are the focus of this report, which draws mainly on sales held in the UK and US in the summer months – but also includes one to come in the new season sales.
Musical marvels impress in Paris
28 August 2017Music, in printed editions rather than autograph scores, played a significant part in raising a premium-inclusive €1.65m (£1.45m) for the third portion of the Pierre Bergé library to come to auction.
1813 and all tatt
26 August 2017Tattooed from head to foot, this ‘Native of Nukahiva’ (in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia) features on one of the two frontispieces and a folding chart that form the illustrative content of the 1813, first English edition of Adam von Krusenstern’s 1803-06 Voyage round the World…
Get it into perspective
21 August 2017A 1765 first of John L Cowley’s The theory of perspective demonstrated… sold for £17,000 by Christie’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 12 appears to be the only first edition recorded at auction.
Playwright shows cricket skills
21 August 2017Sold for £400 on July 5 by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium), as part of an online sale of cricket books, was one of just 50 specially bound copies of The Catch: A Correspondence by Harold Pinter and Alan Wilkinson.
How fragments sell for fortunes
21 August 2017Over the years, any number of rare and very early manuscript fragments have been recovered from disintegrating old bindings in which they had been used as packing.
Royal tearaway's tale revealed by auction link to London's past and ‘Antiquity Smith’
18 August 2017John Thomas Smith, reportedly born in a hackney carriage on a June evening in 1766, was an artist, writer and a Londoner.
Cornucopia of works on paper reveals early 20th French gem
14 August 2017Large numbers of lots identified only as folders, boxes and albums full of prints, watercolours, maps and so on offered in a Brightwells (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of July 5 included one disarmingly catalogued, in full, as ‘Sketches, Watercolours, Prints of Naked Ladies, chiefly’. It sold at £500.
To whom did Clare Leighton dedicate her 1933 set of wood engravings?
14 August 2017Almost 30 years ago, a proof copy of Clare Leighton’s 'The Farmer’s Year of 1933', effectively a cased set of 12 of her wood engravings, all captioned, signed and inscribed in her hand, sold for £2800 at Sotheby’s.
Botanist follows herbal remedy in full colour 16th century text judged 'most beautiful' of its kind
14 August 2017Celebrated work in German issued from a Basel press sells for six figures in Stockholm auction.
Tolkien writes early verses to get into the Hobbit
14 August 2017Three of the poems featured in A Northern Venture…, a slim collection of verses by members of the Leeds University English School Association published by the Swan Press in 1923, added considerable value to this now rare little work.
Cologne edition of the first Bible in Low German makes £195,000 at Christie's
07 August 2017“With the exception of Dürer’s Apocalypse, the most influential woodcut programme from Germany was that of the Cologne Bible of 1478-79.”
Gould’s Birds of Britain flies to £36,000 at Dominic Winter
07 August 2017Handsomely bound, a set of Gould’s Birds of Britain offered as part of the small but select Dorros ornithological library at Christie’s New York sale of June 15 failed against a $60,000-80,000 estimate, but in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of the previous day a very differently presented set brought a mid-estimate £36,000.
Thomas Fale’s work on the art of dialling sell at Bonhams for £5000
07 August 2017Bid to £5000 at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was a 1593 first of Thomas Fale’s 'Horolographia. The Art of Dialling'.
The Brontë sisters’ struggle to be printed
07 August 2017Leading a 75-lot Brontë collection sold by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 10* was a set of two of the novels written by the sisters in the hugely productive years of 1846-47.
Karl Marx makes auction mark
05 August 2017Sold for €62,500 (£54,825) by German auction house Kiefer (20% buyer’s premium) in a June 30-July 1 sale in Pforzheim was an 1867, Hamburg first edition of the first volume of Karl Marx’s 'Das Kapital'.
One Welshman and his goat: rare broadside takes £1200 at auction
03 August 2017Dating from the early to mid-18th century, the large, roughly 16 x 14in wood engraving called ‘Shone-Ap-Morgan, Shentleman of Wales’ seen below is an exceptionally rare broadside that was sold for £1200 in a Dominic Winter auction this summer.
First edition of HG Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ doubles estimate at £11,000
28 July 2017Martians land in Surrey and terrorise much of southern England in tripedal war-machines equipped with death-rays before finally succumbing to terrestrial bacteria. That, put very simply, is the story line of HG Wells’ 1898 novel, ‘The War of the Worlds’, an apocalyptic vision that retains an iconic place in the realms of science fiction.