This copy of Arrowsmith’s atlas, first issued in 1841-42, contained 65 outline coloured, double-page engraved maps dated 1840-44 – among them the important Texas map. The final map in the atlas, British Guiana, had suffered some marginal loss.
A first edition of the Combe-Rowlandson English Dance of Death which attracted a lot of trade interest but went on to sell to a collector at £1200 is also pictured here (see caption story below), while other highlights included:
• A 1785 first of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, in worn half calf, at £400 to a collector.
• A 1912 first English edition of Amundsen’s The South Pole, the two vols. in original cloth gilt, at £900 to a private buyer.
• ‘The Oogle-Oo’, a Ms illustrated with 26 full page ink and watercolour drawings (for his daughter) by Gerald Sichel, at £200 (Jo-Ann Reisler).
Keys, Aylsham, May 11
Buyer’s premium: 10 per cent
Right, top: sold for £3200 to a collector was a group of 11 wash and white heightened illustrations by Charles Kerr, mostly made (but not all of them finally used) in the Silver Rider edition of Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily [1892?]. This reproduction is cropped to exclude those little lot number stickers that appear on all pictures in Keys’ sale
catalogues.
Right, bottom: bound in half morocco gilt by Bayntuns with skull motifs to the spine panels, a two volume, first bookform edition (1815-16) of William Combe’s The English Dance of Death – illustrated with over 70 colour plates after Thomas Rowlandson, was sold at £1200.
Lone Star attractions and the Silver Riders
UK: TWO LOTS in this Norfolk sale stood head and shoulders above all others, at least in financial terms. One was a group of original illustrations by Charles Kerr for a Rider Haggard adventure story that made £3200 (see caption story below); the other a copy of John Arrowsmith’s London Atlas in modern half calf that reached £6600 (Heald).
