Books & Periodicals

Copies of the 1900, first edition of Winston Churchill’s novel Savrola have made as much as £3500 at auction.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

A couple of surprise results emerged in a sale held in Armadale, Victoria, by Australian Book Auctions (19.8% buyer’s premium).

I understand that the Battersea antiques fair had to be ticketed this time to recoup monies lost to previous cancellations.

I wonder if it could be explained to me why, in the currently fashionable world of ‘modern first editions’, there is a trend to link the words ‘first edition’ and ‘impression’ in the same sentence.

Letter from cryptology expert describes his analysis of a Monte Carlo betting system

Though the matching bindings were much later ones commissioned by London dealer Sotherans, a set of Charles Dickens’ five famous Christmas Books offered on August 28 by Potter & Potter (20% buyer’s premium) of Chicago were all firsts of 1843-48, and in some instances first issue or first state copies.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Illustrated from drawings made by William Gibb, printed under his supervision and signed by the author, George Petree, one of 16 special copies of Dundee, its Quaint and Historic Old Buildings that were printed on Japanese paper in 1895 made a far higher than expected result at auction.

Complete year runs of Beano from the years 1958 and ‘59 that sold at £3050 and £3550 topped the bidding in a Comic Book Auctions (20% buyer’s premium) timed online sale that ended on August 29.

High demand today for manuscripts revealing 17th century domestic arrangements.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Bid to a much higher than expected £4000 on August 19 at Thomson Roddick (18% buyer’s premium) was a lot offering 10 volumes of pamphlets, offprints, reports, legal evidence, etc, relating to licensing laws and the campaign to regulate consumption in the UK.

Oddly titled by its creator as such, an extraordinary watercolour featured on August 10 at John Nicholson’s (25% buyer’s premium) of Fernhurst.

It was when the book was in the process of being catalogued by Bretells (19% buyer’s premium) of Newport, Shropshire, that a second impression copy of Tolkien’s The Hobbit was seen to bear the author’s signature.

This handwritten page from the manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles will feature at Heritage Auctions.

Bid to £2400, a signed and inscribed copy of Philip Pullman’s nowadays scarce first novel, The Haunted Storm of 1971, was an unexpectedly successful lot in an online modern literature auction held by Forum (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on August 5.

Part of a medieval manuscript stolen in Italy more than 30 years ago has been returned with the help of London firm Bloomsbury Auctions.