This opening book section also included two full-page composite illustrations and the catalogue cover itself – which depicted a selection of antiques in the sale, a copy of Loggan’s Cantabrigia Illustrata open on a desk in the foreground – was designed to look like a well bound book. Even the endpapers were mocked up as marbled specimens, overlaid with details from engraved plates in Loggan’s famous work on the auctioneers’ place of business. All in all, an impressive show and a far cry from the treatment that books get in some country antique sales.
Illustrated top right is the somewhat browned pictorial title page of the copy of David Loggan’s Cantabrigia Illustrata of c.1688 that sold for £8000. Bound in contemporary full speckled calf gilt, cracked at the joints, it is complete with 30 plates, and though there was some slight discolouration and the Trinity College plate had a small tear to the central fold, it was a generally good copy. Loggan’s companion Oxonia Illustrata of 1675, complete with 40 plates and though showing light staining to several plates, especially to the centre folds, otherwise a good copy in full red morocco gilt, was sold at £5600.
With the portraits of the Founders of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge separately bound, an Ackermann History of the University of Cambridge, the two main vols. of 1815 bound in contemporary calf gilt, sold at £5200.
A bound collection of ‘Costume of the Various Orders in the University of Cambridge’, comprising pictorial title and 17 watercolours made £1200 and a collection of some 1300 printed portraits of the 17th-19th century relating to the University of Cambridge, contained in six large cloth albums, reached £4000.
Titled ‘Bell’s Antiquities of Cambridgeshire’, two large folio
volumes containing drawings of churches, architectural details, arms, monuments, plans etc. – some coloured and all relating to villages in the vicinity of Cambridge – sold at £1600.
Bound in later full calf gilt, a 1662 first of William Dugdale’s History of Imbanking and Drayning of divers Fens and Marshes...., illustrated with 11 folding engraved plates, was sold at £1650.
The seven volume set of Lord Lilford’s Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands of 1885-97 shown right, illustrated with 421 chromolithos (some spotted or browned) is in faded half morocco and has the original covers preserved in a separate volume. It sold for £3000.
Lower right: bound in half green morocco, now faded to the spines, a seven vol. set of Elwes & Henry’s The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, 1906-13, also retains the original covers, but here bound in at the end of each volume. This set made £1700, but at Christie’s South Kensington on November 30, a set in unmarked or faded half crimson morocco was sold at £2400 and at King Street on November 28, that same sum was paid for a set in which each volume had been been bound by Birdsall’s in Fallow deerskin over seven different types of wooden board, all from Petworth Park.
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent
Cambridge blues, and reds, and yellows – books get the full colour treatment…
The book section of a general antiques sale held by Cheffins of Cambridge on November 1 ran to only 58 lots, but this saleroom produces impressive, colour illustrated catalogues and no fewer that a dozen of those lots were illustrated, some of them at full page.
