His exertions were more than amply rewarded when this 1873 first edition, the three volumes in Tinsley Brothers’ original green cloth, demolished his own £1500-2500 estimate and, after competition between eight bidders, reached £13,000.
The first edition section of the sale also included a copy of Middlemarch (1871-72), but the four volumes were in later, three-quarter black leather and a bid of £400 was only half way to the low estimate and certainly short of the reserve.
Mr Cranwell also promoted his golfing books via the specialist lists and was rewarded with a bid of £3200 on a very rare, 1857 (Cupar) first edition, in original red cloth, of The Golfer’s Manual by ‘A Keen Hand’, subsequently identified as H.B. Farnie, a journalist who had been educated at St. Andrews. Farnie’s book was the first (in prose) devoted entirely to the game and the first golfing instruction manual.
An 1898 first edition (in original but slightly faded pictorial green boards) of one of Horace Hutchinson’s many golf books, The Golfing Pilgrim on Many Links, was sold at £400.
Highlights of the travel and mountaineering section, all in original cloth, included a 1922 edition of Shackleton’s South..., at £300 and firsts of Lt.-Col. Howard-Bury’s Mount Everest, the Reconnaissance (1922), at £130 and Rock-Climbing in North Wales (1906) by George & Ashley Abraham.
Among sporting titles was F.H. Bayles’ Race Course Atlas of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1903 with descriptions and coloured diagrams of 60 courses, which made £320.
An illustrated Army & Navy Stores General Price List for the years 1937-38, catalogued as offering “everything to equip William Boot for Abyssinia and much, much more”, sold at £130.
Lunt Tomley, Oswestry, March 8
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent
Thomas Hardy and A Pair of Blue Eyes
UK: JUST TO prove that “one can get a better... deal from the smaller boys”, John Cranwell, who trades in Oswestry as Bookworld and puts together two auctions a year for the local auctioneers, rang every Thomas Hardy specialist he could find in Sheppard's directory prior to this sale – determined that no-one with a declared interest should be unaware of the fact that a copy of Hardy’s third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, was to be offered in this 400-lot sale at the town’s Wynnstay Hotel.
