Books & Periodicals

Huge York event includes a mobile installation on bird theme.

Useful buys if you want to know how to ‘pott a Swan’, ‘fry Harticholk’ or even ‘stew Lettice’

Lots offered towards the start of sales at the same auction house prove successful.

An exceptional 11-lot group of the works of James Sowerby featured in a Swedish summer sale.

Compiled for official British War Office use on the eve of the American War of Independence, this quarto volume bearing the manuscript title ‘The Uniform of the Several Regiments of Foot in His Majesty’s Service’ doubled the high estimate at Christie’s New York (25/20/13.5% buyer’s premium).

'Versuche über Pflanzen Hybriden' by Gregor Mendel is a paper that marked the foundation of the science of genetics.

The reason that an otherwise unexceptional 1737 English language edition of Horace’s 'Odes, Satyrs and Epistles' – lacking a portrait and three text pages – sold for the substantial sum of £50,000 in the Bonhams (27.5/25/20/13.9%) sale on June 26 is to be found on the front endpaper notes shown below.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

A group of 481 rare book lots from the personal collection of renowned collector in the New York literary community features in Heritage Auctions’ rare books sale on September 5.

Published in 1851 by Richard Bentley as The Whale, the first English edition of Herman Melville’s tale preceded the American issue by four weeks.

Shown below is ‘Un Baleinobus’, one of a rare series of 78 chromlitho illustrations featured on eight uncut stock cards or sheets that sold for £1000 as part of a Hansons (20% buyer’s premium) sale of July 31.

Copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone impressed in several summer sales.

ATG's regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Published in 1931, Pearl S Buck’s 'The Good Earth' was the best-selling novel in the US for both that and the following year, as well as the winner of a Pulitzer Prize.

A copy of 'The Island of Adventure' offered in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) sale of June 19-20 sold for £360 – just £10 short of the auction record set for a copy it had offered back in 2006.

Pioneering astronomical works which appeared many centuries before the moon landing sell at auction.

Shown below is a spread from a 120pp manuscript collection of Scottish songs with accompanying musical notation, on paper watermarked 1799, that sold at £600 in a Thomson Roddick (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale.

Despite some minor loss to the head of 'When We Were Very Young', published in 1924 and a first edition of what are now collectively known as the ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books, overall the set pictured below is an exceptionally well-preserved one.

Our regular listings of British and Irish book auctions.