The first issue copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, (illustrated right) was slightly bumped at the lower front corners and, has a scratch on the rear cover.
It also has a literary agent’s label on the front free endpaper. The author provided a specimen of her signature on a sticker which was placed inside the book prior to sale, but while expectations of £8000-10,000 proved too optimistic, this copy did find a buyer at £6600.
A 1998 first of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in an unclipped wrapper and again with added signature, was sold for £500 and the signed copy of …Goblet of Fire of 2000 that had been sent in by J.K. Rowling reached £240.
The original donations had been made by author and broadcaster Simon Singh, a signed copy of whose own book of 1997, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World’s Greatest Minds for 358 Years – illustrated below right– was bid to £80.
This was the last sale for the firm’s book specialist Bill Hoade, the Salisbury firm having decided to forgo the luxury of further specialist book and print sales and to include them in future with their picture sales. It was also a rather disappointing sale to end with – in that buyers were found for only 79 of the 180 lots that made up the book and printed ephemera section of the catalogue.
In a 19th century cloth binding, now faded at the spine, and slightly spotted and stained internally, a 1755 edition of Johann Jonston’s Theatrum Universale... de Quadrupedibus, illustrated with 80 engraved plates of creatures real and fanciful, sold at £620, and in a late 19th century binding of half calf, now rubbed and weak at the upper hinge, a copy of Henry C. Englefield’s …Principal Picturesque Beauties, Antiquities and Geological Phenomena of the Isle of Wight… of 1816, illustrated with maps and numerous engraved plates after Englefield and T.Webster, was sold for £420.
Two very long runs of the prestigious Eastern carpet journal Hali sold at £1550 apiece – one of them offering Issue Nos.1-114, plus the index vol. for the years 1978-95; the other being complete to issue no. 120 (1978-2002) and including a copy of the Hali Annual No. 1.
Illustrated with 120 coloured or black and white plates and still in the original half morocco bindings, a copy of Sarre & Trenkwald’s two-vol. Anciens Tapis d’Orient... of 1927, which sold for £1250.
Sold at £80 was one of the more esoteric lots of the day, an inscribed presentation copy of Henry Harland Hansen’s Mongol Costumes, a 1950 Copenhagen imprint in the original printed wrappers.
Harry Potter and the last of the Salisbury book and print specials
ON LEARNING that first edition copies of her first two Harry Potter books were to to be sold at Woolley & Wallis’February 12 auction to benefit Action Aid and Children in Need, author J.K. Rowling agreed to add her signature to both books and donated a signed copy of the fourth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
