The “four volumes of Portraits of Celebrated Racehorses” which made up the lot, I take to be Thomas Henry Taunton’s profusely illustrated record of racehorses from 1702-1870, published in 1887. I have no idea what the Somerset local history book might be worth, but that equestrian picture gallery alone usually sells for several hundred pounds – and, in a good binding, it can be a four-figure lot at the serious retail end of the line. The mixed Worcester lot that contained these two works was sold for £440.
A three-volume ‘National Shakespeare’, a facsimile of the 1623 First Folio issued in 1882 with illustrations after Sir J. Noel Paton, was sold for £210. Seemingly in the publisher’s green morocco gilt bindings, this too is something which can make much more – but, as with the racehorses, I have no note of condition.
Andrew Grant, Worcester, March 10
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent
Unfancied racehorses?
THE BOOK section of this Worcester sale contained a good many equestrian titles, and while several seemed to be fairly modern and were job-lotted, what appears to have been the most important of these horse books was tacked onto a lot that led with an 1830 History of the Hundred of Carhampton in the County of Somerset by James Savage, and “three other books”.
