Books & Periodicals

With every one of the 531 lots sold, from an oak gateleg table that opened proceedings to a 1925 Douglas motorcycle, the March 29 Bonhams (25/20/15% buyer’s premium) sale of contents from Glyn Cywarch, a Welsh home of the Lords Harlech, was one of those ‘white-glove’ sales in which auction rooms take such pride.

Featured in a recent report (ATG No: 2286), a copy of Sir Charles Doyly’s Views of Calcutta and its Environs that sold for £14,000 at Chiswick Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) on March 22 was one of many lots – both printed and manuscript – that came with a Harrington family provenance.

Published in New York in 1977, The Vanished World Portfolio is a selection of a dozen photographs from the very many that were taken in the late 1930s in Cracow, Warsaw, the Carpathian regions and elsewhere in eastern Europe by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990).

Hans Christian Andersen did not confine himself to the fairy tales that are his principal and lasting legacy.

The Arctic Regions, 1873, a sumptuously bound narrative of American artist William Bradford’s seven expeditions to the Arctic, illustrated with 141 mounted albumen photographs, is the highest-estimated lot in the April 20 Swann Galleries photographs and photobooks sale.

London sale offers ground-breaking grammatical studies from 16th and 17th centuries.

Calculations and notes predicting the orbit of what at the time was a newly discovered and very large asteroid, Juno, brought a bid of £7000 at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on March 1.

Filling much of a full-page advertisement in ATG No 2284 for the Pierre Bergé/Sotheby’s (24/20.5/17% buyer’s premium) sale in Paris on April 26 of books and manuscripts from the library of Jean A Bonna was the star turn – a stunning copy of Galileo’s Discorsi et Dimostrazioni matematiche of 1638.

Some people who voted Remain at the EU Referendum last year have been dismayed at the Brexit outcome and have dreaded the triggering of Article 50, formally notifying the EU of the UK’s intention to withdraw.

“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.

The legal impasse surrounding the restitution of thousands of historical documents and manuscripts from the scandal-hit Aristophil investment scheme was finally broken last week.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning lots fall flat... but annotated Dorian Gray leaves treble the estimate

Following a deal between the German state and specialist manuscripts dealer Les Enluminures, this 10th century illuminated Gospels created at Liesborn Abbey will return to Westphalia.

A crease that runs around the lower part of the dust jacket detracts somewhat from the appeal of a first impression copy of the first of Ian Fleming’s Bond books, Casino Royale of 1953, but it sold for £16,000 in a March 1 sale held by Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

Possibly the first printed reference to a ‘Great White’ shark attack is found in a four-page pamphlet, printed in Naples in 1721, from which the woodcut shown here is taken.

With BBC Radio 4 currently offering a season of programmes focusing on the Red Planet in fact and fiction, a couple of books from the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of Martian fantasies that made high prices in a recent US sale are an appropriate choice for these reports.