Forum Auctions

Bid to a record £20,000 at a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 26 was a beautifully bound example of Piranesi’s Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis.

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.

Estimated at £10,000-15,000 in a Forum Auctions sale of November 21 is a French indenture agreement of 1421 with a certain added English appeal.

Much of Paula Rego’s (b.1935) work is concerned with narrative, as seen in this limited-edition lithograph of a girl reading a book.

A small but very successful section of a recent London sale offered a group of just eight lots related to the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76.

A final selection of works from the London summer sale of books from the Fox Pointe Manor library* includes a gruesome account of London’s ‘Great Plague’.

Very different works by Daniel Defoe featured in an online summer sale in London: one famous, the other far removed in its subject matter and probably little known.

Useful buys if you want to know how to ‘pott a Swan’, ‘fry Harticholk’ or even ‘stew Lettice’

Lots offered towards the start of sales at the same auction house prove successful.

Copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone impressed in several summer sales.

For three years now Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) has, in addition to its high-profile auctions, been holding fortnightly, online-only timed sales that in their diverse content, it feels, act as a useful bellwether for the book world at large.

Two recent auctions offered a number of 18th and 19th century English novels by authors unfamiliar to many readers but who are nevertheless in demand through their rare surviving works.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

A poet and dramatist, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was once considered by many to be the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.