• An album of 81 tipped-in photogravures of Ceylon, a small folio work produced by Plâté & Co. around 1900 and including coastal scenes, landscapes, town and village views, working elephants, railways, portraits and figure groups, was valued at just £100-150, but bidding reached £2900 (Jacobsen).
• An album of nude photographic studies of the 1870s-90s, most “involving couples of each or the same sex enjoying a variety of mutually stimulating activities”, to quote the cataloguer, went to a private buyer at £3000.
• A bound collection of 28 original drawings and 22 lithos of early 19th century designs for clocks, candelabra and inkstands – apparently from the same studio – was sold at £5500 (Plante). Almost all bear the initials JBA, but two are identified as designs by Jean François Jeannest, a sculptor, medallist and modeller.
• Bound in contemporary vellum, a Mercator & Hondius Atlas Minor of 1628, containing 140 full-page engraved maps, was sold at £6500 (Millner).
• An 1842-49, tinted folio set of David Roberts’ Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, lacking 16 of the plates from Vol.I of the Holy Land section and with some spotting elsewhere, made £29,000.
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A Succinct Description of that Elaborate Pile of Art, call’d The Microcosm, a pamphlet of 1760, was among the more unusual lots in a May 17 sale held by BBA – one that I almost passed by. Printed for the proprietor, it is a description of of a complex astronomical showpiece, constructed externally to resemble a Roman temple, that was exhibited for 40 years in Britain and Europe and was even taken across the Atlantic and shown in New England.
Also part of the lot, which sold at £480 to Jarndyce, was a disbound 1756 copy of John Huxham’s Medical and Clinical Observations upon Antimony.
Bloomsbury Book Auctions, London, May 31 & June 4
No of lots: 370
Lots sold: 216
Sale total: £308,360
Buyer’s premium:15/10 per cent
Prints of light and darkness
UK: A DOUBLE catalogue of prints, and maps saw many failures – nearly half of the 224 lots that made up the May sale of Old Master, sporting and decorative prints, plus photographs and drawings – but a selection from what might be termed the “better half” appears below.
