Dominic Winter

A GROUP of five photographs by pioneering British photographer Roger Fenton (1819-1869) sold for £100,500, some five times above their combined estimate, at Dominic Winter of South Cerney, Gloucestershire on June 17.

THERE can be no more important figure in British inter-War aviation than the aircraft designer Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895-1937).

JOHN Taylor was the Sawrey joiner and wheelwright, whose wife and stout, elderly daughter, Agnes Anne, kept the village shop immortalised by Beatrix Potter in Ginger and Pickles. But the first Taylor to appear in one of her books was his son, young John, who was the model for the terrier carpenter John Joiner in The Roly Poly Pudding.

Madame Tussauds added Winston Churchill to their waxwork tableaux for the first time in 1908, but had produced another half dozen portraits before his death in 1965. The last of them was put up for sale by Dominic Winter on May 18.

LAST week’s ATG included a short piece on a 1566 poem by Patrick Adamson, giving thanks for the birth of a son to Mary Queen of Scots, that made £3100 in a Dominic Winter sale of April 6.

According to Brunet, Giulio Ferrario’s monumental study of Le Costume Ancien et Moderne ou Histoire de Gouvernement, de la Milice, de la Réligion, des Arts, Sciences et usages de tous les Peuples anciens et Modernes, was originally published in Milan in 143 parts between 1816 and 1834 – simultaneously in French and Italian.

The Simon Hall collection of cookery books, to which were added lots from other sources, was offered by Dominic Winter on January 27.

Attracting some welcome national publicity for Swindon book specialists Dominic Winter (15% buyer’s premium) on November 11, was the remarkable performance of a group of early railway tickets consigned for sale by the widow of a Gloucestershire collector.

IN rebacked and refurbished contemporary calf, the copy of Hobbes’ Leviathan... seen at a Dominic Winter sale of August 25 was a 1651 first edition, but both the engraved additional title and main printed title were cut down and relaid, the folding table was torn and repaired and there was some browning and dampstaining.

HANDSOMELY bound in dark crimson morocco gilt in the 19th century, a 1609, first folio edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the titles to the two parts with large and elaborate woodcut devices (both with small amounts of early colouring) and containing numerous woodcut head- and tailpieces incorporating various royal devices and symbols, made £1740 (Powell) in a Dominic Winter sale of July 21.

RIGHT: one of 23 coloured aquatints by George Hunt after M.E[gerton] that make up Airy Nothings; Or, Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-cum-Shorts; in a Circumbendipus Hop, Step and Jump, by Olio Rigmaroll, a slim quarto volume of 1825, this one shows ‘Quadrille Dancing at Mr Owen’s Institution, near Lanark’ – the model community established by social and education reformer Robert Owen at the New Lanark cotton mills.

NOW that’s what I call a conservatory – Item No. 237 from a two vol. Illustrated Catalogue of Macfarlane’s Castings of c.1884, this monster is one of the very many items of decorative cast iron railings, gates, balconies, windows, lamps, glasshouses, etc. available from the manufacturers.

THE early 20th century George Abraham of Keswick issued three titles that have become classics of rock climbing literature and two of them, offered by Dominic Winter on July 21, are seen right.

RIGHT: a folding plate from an 1847 first of James Clark Ross’ Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, the two vols. bound in later polished calf gilt by Henry Young of Liverpool, which made £1200 in a Dominic Winter sale of August 25.

ESTIMATED at £70-100 but bid way past that level by Taikoo Books of York was a copy of Captain R.L. Playfair’s History of Arabia Felix or Yemen…, a Bombay imprint of 1859 which also includes an account of the British settlement at Aden.

ENGLISH Heritage successfully bid £11,500 for a portfolio of 47 photographs of the exterior and interior of the Crystal Palace in a Dominic Winter sale of August 25.

A DOMINIC Winter sale of July 21 included a collection of Victorian bookbindings from the library of the late Dr Nigel Temple.

SEEN right is the illuminated title which, together with a full-page miniature of The Annunciation and numerous coloured and gold initials, make up the principal decoration of vellum manuscript collection of Prières et Oraisons Dévotés produced by the great calligrapher Nicholas Jarry (c.1615-7).

ONE yellow-covered rabbit book in the Dominic Winter sale of June 24, a scarce 1922 first of Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, with its William Nicholson illustrations, was left unsold on an estimate of £4000-5000 (the original pictorial boards had been “rebacked in facsimile”) but the 1972 first of Richard Adams’ Watership Down, seen right – a copy used in the V&A’s 1977 ‘After Alice’ exhibition – made £610 in Swindon.

PICK of the recent Beatrix Potters were seen in the Dominic Winter sale of June 24, where the 1903 first of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, seen right, complete with printed glassine jacket (showing some spine and edge loss) and inscribed as a Christmas gift at the time by the author to a Mrs Lord, was sold at £7600 to Hawthorn Books, who gave a further £7600 for a jacketed, 1904 first of The Tale of Benjamin Bunny that Beatrix Potter inscribed to Mrs Lord.