An 1887 first of Hardy’s The Woodlanders, the three vols. in original cloth and stamped “With the Publisher’s Compliments” made £480 and The Return of the Native, an 1878 first in half crimson leather, lacking one advertisement leaf, made £460, while a well read and worn copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902, plucked from a mixed box of books at one of their weekly free valuation mornings, made £360.
A 1946 first of Enid Blyton’s Five go off in a Caravan, that was not even granted the distinction of a token estimate, made £180 despite damp spotting to the covers and chipping and creasing to the jacket, and an equally undervalued box of children’s and other books sold at £460. The only lot identified in the latter was a damp damaged copy in chipped, stained and defective jacket of The Magic Pudding. The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum, written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay and published in Sydney in 1918.
Biggles books included a 1935 OUP first in pictorial blue cloth of Biggles Flies East which sold at £140, while a £25-35 valued job lot of 16 titles by George E. Rochester, among them The Secret Squadron in Germany of c.1941, reached £220.
Signed, limited edition copies of Twelfth Night [1908] and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914) with plates by W. Heath Robinson made £360 and £380.
In rebacked full speckled calf, the Rev. John Coker’s Survey of Dorsetshire... of 1732 with a folding map as frontispiece and six plates of armorial bearings, was sold at £290.
Famous Five are one of the surprises of 1000
AT OVER 1000 lots, the May 22 sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt of Taunton was certainly one of the bigger sales of that week, but only a single lot topped the £1000 mark – a disbound, incomplete and defective English Bible. Apparently a 1540 reissue in smaller format of the Great Bible that Thomas Cromwell ordered to be placed in the country’s churches so that “parishioners may moste commodiously resorte to the same”, it was bid up to £1250.
