Miss Owenson’s publishers initially declined to handle to the book on account of its too openly avowed nationalist sentiments, but when Maria Edgworth’s publisher, Johnson, offered 300 guineas for it, they re-asserted their rights and issued the book in 1806. In less than two years it had run through seven editions (including at least two in America) and has seldom, if ever, been out of print since. In this Oxford sale, a three-vol. 1807 edition in “half marbled boards” made £320.
Bearing a Dublin imprint of 1772 and bound in contemporary calf, a copy of Forster’s translation of De Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World.... was sold at £280 and an oblong, large quarto album titled Souvenir d’Algerie and containing some 50 photographs, sold at £500.
A box containing a quantity of Kelly’s and other guides, handbooks and directories of the Oxford area – as well as an 1883 Kelly’s
Buckinghamshire – sold at £600.
A Dylan Thomas job lot that included Dent firsts in dust jackets of The Map of Love (1939), Death and Entrances (1946) and Under Milk Wood (1954), plus six others – some of them firsts but unspecified – was sold at £450, while 14 Iris Murdoch firsts in jackets, the earliest of them The Unofficial Rose of 1962, made £280.
Sold at £220 was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an ‘Authorised’ book of the Disney film of 1938, complete with dust jacket – but in the picture section of this Oxford sale two cells from the animated version of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman sold at £800 and £850.
Right: in full leather [red morocco gilt?] bindings, this 13-volume, limited edition set of British Sports and Sportsmen of c.1910-14 was sold for £1550 in Oxford, which, given the prices asked for the more popular volumes – Big Game Hunting and Angling, or Yachting and Rowing, for example – does not seem at all expensive.
Mallams, Oxford, May 23
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent
The Wild Irish Girl’s publishers almost missed the boat…
THE WILD IRISH GIRL was the novel that made the name of Miss Sydney Owenson, the daughter of a Shrewsbury merchant and mayor who later married Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, surgeon to her Dublin patrons, the Marquess and Lady Abercorn. A self-proclaimed national tale, it weaves Irish history, politics and mythology into a romantic tale but the author’s vision of a politically and religiously united Ireland remains a dream.
