Dominic Winter

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships

Music played its part in the first Dominic Winter sale of the year, with books, scores and other autograph material from another but differently sourced Elgar collection to others offered before by the saleroom.

Carroll rubbed shoulders with Wilde, Rackham, Tolkien and many other children’s works in recent auctions.

A classic metaphysical fantasy novel that sold poorly when first issued but later influenced the works of CS Lewis and gained many admirers, A Voyage to Arcturus is the work of David Lindsay.

Illustrated here are two of the 20 hand-coloured litho plates, many showing the Crystal Palace in the background and each with a rhyming couplet below, that make up Blondin’s Marvellous Feats.

Complete with slightly frayed and browned but rarely seen jacket, a 1933 copy of George Orwell’s 'Down and Out in Paris and London' was bid to £46,000 by James Hall of Lucius Books in York at a Dominic Winter sale.

British bee books formed an unusual feature of a November 8 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium).

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships

It looks very tatty, but the dust jacket shown below is apparently a rare variant featuring a classic 1937 design by Alex Jardine for a 1927 first ‘Coronation’ edition of the Café Royal Cocktail Book.

A single-owner collection focusing on the polar regions was a notable feature of the travel section of the October 4 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium). It included, at a 10-times estimate £3000, the posthumously published Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph Rene Bellot.

In recent years Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) has enjoyed considerable success with cookery manuscripts and the most recent auction further enhanced the saleroom’s recipe for culinary success.

Tattooed from head to foot, this ‘Native of Nukahiva’ (in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia) features on one of the two frontispieces and a folding chart that form the illustrative content of the 1813, first English edition of Adam von Krusenstern’s 1803-06 Voyage round the World…

Three of the poems featured in A Northern Venture…, a slim collection of verses by members of the Leeds University English School Association published by the Swan Press in 1923, added considerable value to this now rare little work.

‘L’Abbé Quille’ (shown below), against whose leg a dog is seen relieving itself in the illustration, is one of 84 hand-coloured plates – 12 each of seven subjects – that make up a French magic trick book of c.1799 sold for £2900 by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) in a June 19-20 sale.

Handsomely bound, a set of Gould’s Birds of Britain offered as part of the small but select Dorros ornithological library at Christie’s New York sale of June 15 failed against a $60,000-80,000 estimate, but in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of the previous day a very differently presented set brought a mid-estimate £36,000.