Book

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Offered as part of a sale held in Bristol were two copies of 'The Merchants Avizo….', a work by a local man, John Browne.

With only eight of the 178 lots offered left on the shelves at the day’s end and a top lot in the six-figure bracket, a Doyle (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) online auction was certainly a success.

Chaucer and Shakespeare, Darwin and Tolkien were among the big-name and more expensive lots sold as part of the Gerald and Barbara Weiner library at Hindman (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in Chicago.

Principal attraction in a Crewkerne book sale at Lawrences (25% buyers premium) was the Browning family archive that featured as Pick of the Week in ATG No 2459, but three other items from that 370 lot sale are noted here.

Two very different lots were bid to $22,000 (£17,325) each in a sale of printed and manuscript Americana held in New York.

Printed volumes and manuscripts contain many rare works and unusual material

Over 50 lots, many of them multiples, offered in a sale held by Thomson Roddick (18% buyer’s premium) featured the works of Bram Stoker.

At a recent PBFA fair, dealer John Underwood sold a collection of albums of mosses compiled by the naturalist Frederick DuCane Godman (1834-1919) to Horsham Museum & Art Gallery.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Jane Austen was among the names to note in a recent Norfolk sale, with the day’s top bid securing a four-volume, 1818 first of Northanger Abbey & Persuasion.

Stand-out lot in a travel, map and natural history sale held by Sotheby’s (25/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) was a grand and elaborately cased set of the monumental 'Description de l’Egypte' of 1809-22.

Plenty of Dickensian lots were on offer in a sale held by US saleroom PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium).

Always likely to produce one of the sale’s best results, a 1798 first of Thomas Malthus’ 'Essay on the Principle of Population' duly led the bidding in a recent German sale.

A number of higher-priced lots featured in a sale held by Hindman (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of Chicago this summer, where fine binding was very much in evidence on both individual volumes and sets.

One of the few first-edition copies of 'Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone' inscribed and signed by JK Rowling has sold at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh for £100,000 (plus 25% premium).

The two most expensive lots in an online London books sale of just 100 lots could hardly have been more different.