First Edition

For three years now Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) has, in addition to its high-profile auctions, been holding fortnightly, online-only timed sales that in their diverse content, it feels, act as a useful bellwether for the book world at large.

Bid to £19,700 in a recent sale was one of 100 signed, large paper firsts of Oscar Wilde’s 'The Importance of Being Earnest' published by Leonard Smithers in 1899.

Devoted wholly to modern firsts, a recent online sale presented the first selection of a single-owner collection – the second portion of which will be sold later in the year.

A handful of copies of Robert Morden’s 'Geography Rectified, or a Description of the World' have made a little more at auction than a 1680 copy offered in a Stacey’s (24% buyer’s premium) sale of September 10 – but all bar one of them were second or third editions of 1688 and 1693.

Science fiction and fantasy were among the lifelong principal collecting interests of the late Stanley Simon, a postal worker from Queens. In a recent 19th and 20th century literature sale held in his home city of New York a number of his books brought record bids.

Complete with slightly frayed and browned but rarely seen jacket, a 1933 copy of George Orwell’s 'Down and Out in Paris and London' was bid to £46,000 by James Hall of Lucius Books in York at a Dominic Winter sale.

Harry Potter’s 20th birthday celebrations continue apace – with a new record for a standard copy of 'The Philosopher’s Stone'.

One of Jules Verne’s most popular tales, 'Around the World in Eighty Days', led the book section of a September 6 sale held by Catherine Southon (18% buyer’s premium).

First editions of Jane Austen’s most popular book, Pride and Prejudice of 1813, in contemporary bindings don’t come along often. But one such prize – a copy with a rather distant but nonetheless attractive family link – appeared at Mellors & Kirk (20% buyer’s premium) in Nottingham on March 22-23.

“Very rare, most extant copies behind institutional walls,” said Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of a first English language version of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.