Books & Periodicals

A coalition of auction houses and book dealers has succeeded in rewording a controversial new law governing the sale of autographed collectables in California.

The celebrated Columbus letter announcing his discovery of a New World, sold for $620,000 (£462,000), was very much the star turn at Bonhams New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 26 (see ATG No 2313).

Printed in 1606 by Valentine Sims of London and in a contemporary limp vellum binding with gilt armorials to the covers, the little 12mo volume shown above combines …the Kings Psalmes with The Queen’s Prayers of Meditations.

A copy of the 1925, Hogarth Press first of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway attracted a great deal of competition in a Cotswold Auction Company (20% buyer’s premium) sale of October 3 and finally sold at £18,000.

Sales held on consecutive days in Edinburgh and London produced two lots that ended up selling for far, far higher than expected sums.

Last week’s first report on the fine travel library of John and Suzanne Bonham at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) focused on the Middle East, India, Central Asia and the Far East. This second selection begins with an African discovery and ends at the South Pole.

A single-owner collection focusing on the polar regions was a notable feature of the travel section of the October 4 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium). It included, at a 10-times estimate £3000, the posthumously published Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph Rene Bellot.

Pictures, prints and taxidermic displays accounted for the larger part of the Ornithology Sale held by Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) on September 22, but it also offered some 175 book lots, many of them multiples.

Sold for £1100 by Chiswick Auctions (23% buyer’s premium) on September 27 was a copy of the posthumously published, 1633 first of Henry Briggs’ Trigonometria britannica….

An example of the extremely rare, “surreptitious” edition of John Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis… – a star atlas that is one of the great rarities in its field – made a record £43,000 at Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 27.

Children’s books sold at Forum included a couple of appealing Beatrix Potter items that were first owned by Francis William Clark, who was just two when he was sent a 1912 first of The Tale of Mr Tod.

At the Ink Fair London on October 25-27, Susanne Sculz-Falster Rare Books offers this collection of 241 butterfly and moth prints housed in a 22-drawer collector’s cabinet, right, for £7500.

“My lord, because I know that you will take pleasure in the great victory which our Lord has granted me on this voyage, I write you this letter, by which you will learn how… I crossed to the Indies, where I found many islands populated with innumerable inhabitants; and I have taken possession of all of them…”

Ed Lake works at Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, specialist in 18th and 19th century English literature and history. His parents opened the business in 1969 and it is based in Great Russell Street, across from the British Museum. The shop’s ground floor has been renovated to recreate a 19th-century bookshop.

When the French literature section of the great Bradley Martin library was sold in 1989 (at Sotheby’s Monaco), an 1845 first of 'La Reine Margot' by Alexandre Dumas père was offered as part of a job lot of three of his works that sold for FFr11,500 (£1100).

The first book sale of the new season at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) dispersed the travel library of John and Suzanne Bonham, well-known specialist dealers in the British and international antiquarian book trade.

Bibliomania has been running for three years at the Espace Champerret in the 17th arrondissement in Paris. The biannual fair draws around 100 exhibiting dealers from across Europe (including Pablo Butcher from Oxford).