Books & Periodicals

A volume containing Richard Hooker’s sixth and eighth books dealing with The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Policy… is a 1651 re-issue of an edition first published three years earlier. The principal attraction, however, was the armorial binding.

Published in 1895, Wright & Dixon’s Guide to American Golf… was one of the very first books on the game to appear in that country. A copy sold on April 12 in San Francisco for $42,500 (£29,930) was billed as “perhaps the only copy extant”.

Printed for circulation only among members of the imperial family and those foreign dignitaries who had participated in the celebrations, an album recording the 1883 coronation in Moscow of Tsar Alexander III and the Empress Marie Feodorovna sold for $30,000 (£21,125) in a US sale.

Bound in recent times as six volumes in elaborately gilt crushed scarlet morocco, a 1614-17 Prague first of a major commentary on the Mishnah by Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579-1654), was a highlight of a recent New York sale of Judaica.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from May 1-12, 2018.

First such pocket atlas published in England leads a look at highly diverse auction selection

Brought into a free valuation day held at Bishop’s Cleve, near Cheltenham, a copy of Eric Ravilious’ High Street sold on March 27 at what would appear to be a record sum in a Derbyshire sale.

Sold for $300,000 (£214,185) apiece in a recent New York sale were three very well-known works from the worlds of cartography and natural history.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from April 25 to May 5, 2018.

A sale devoted to 700 lots of magic memorabilia is to be held by Potter & Potter Auctions in Chicago on April 28.

Running to 600 lots and achieving £560,000 hammer, a recent London sale incorporated a wide range of collecting fields, from Dickensian theatrical ephemera to children’s books and all things Irish.

Collection of more than 100 travel accounts is one highlight of a varied London auction.

An estimate of £120-150 was never going to do for a lot in a Leominster sale of March 28 that was catalogued, in full, as “STEIN, Sir Aurel, Serindia, a Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost, four vols, and a box with maps (5)”.

Something of a rarity, To Iceland in a Yacht appears to have no other auction appearances to its name. It was privately printed in Edinburgh in 1873 for its author, the chemist Robert Angus Smith (1817-84), a man best known for his work on air pollution and his identification of what later came to be known as acid rain.

Composed to mark the departure from these shores after two years of self-imposed exile in Ireland and England, a Farewell Song of Frederick Douglass, on Quitting England for America – the Land of his Birth was published in London in 1847.