Collectables

Bonhams’ September 25 Exploration and Travel sale in New York opens with the 80-lot Joe Fitzsimmons library devoted to works on Antarctic Exploration.

Real rarities and record breakers are among items that feature in this first of a couple of reviews of more literary lots from the wealth of summer sales. Here the focus is principally on works of the last 200 years or so – and includes such diverse characters as Hugh the Heron and the Invisible Man.

Accounts of wars and skirmishes in the southern states of North America and Mexico were one notable feature of an August 23 sale held in San Francisco.

Our round-up of British and Irish book sales coming up from September 18-27, 2018.

Posters advertising the first-ever public screening of a film, which took place in Paris in 1895, have hardly ever emerged outside France. While one is known in an American collection, the appearance of another at Sotheby’s latest online film posters auction understandably caused some excitement.

Considering that W Britain began making his revolutionary hollowcast toy soldiers only in 1893, a set dating from just three years later certainly deserves the tag ‘early’.

Two lots offering heraldic manuscripts – one of them being of particular regional interest – produced the highest bids in a mixed sale of collectables and militaria held in Shrewsbury.

Known familiarly as the ‘Audley End Lydgate’, the mid-15th century vellum manuscript shown below is ‘The Fall of Princes’, a Middle English version by the poet John Lydgate of Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus virorum illustrium.

Our round-up of British and Irish book sales coming up from September 11-21, 2018.

An unpublished letter written by Nelson Mandela from his prison cell on Robben Island is to be offered at Bonhams’ South African sale in New Bond Street on September 14.

Chicago auction house Potter & Potter (20% buyer’s premium) is conjuring up quite a reputation for its magic memorabilia sales.

“The numbers are up to maximum capacity at 226 stands and there are a further 10 stands for calligraphers, marbled paper dealers and bookbinders – it’s the largest ever,” said York bookseller Janette Ray, spokeswoman for PBFA’s annual two-day York Book Fair.

Wide-ranging Lyell family archive brings high prices across the board in London.

In a worn but period calf binding, a 1697 first of John Evelyn’s Numismata. A Discourse of Medals… made £350 in the book section of a recent Cornish auction.

One of the harder titles in the New Naturalist series to find today is RJ Berry’s Natural History of Orkney.