Books and Works on Paper

Shown below is ‘Un Baleinobus’, one of a rare series of 78 chromlitho illustrations featured on eight uncut stock cards or sheets that sold for £1000 as part of a Hansons (20% buyer’s premium) sale of July 31.

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

ATG's regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Published in 1931, Pearl S Buck’s 'The Good Earth' was the best-selling novel in the US for both that and the following year, as well as the winner of a Pulitzer Prize.

A copy of 'The Island of Adventure' offered in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) sale of June 19-20 sold for £360 – just £10 short of the auction record set for a copy it had offered back in 2006.

Pioneering astronomical works which appeared many centuries before the moon landing sell at auction.

Shown below is a spread from a 120pp manuscript collection of Scottish songs with accompanying musical notation, on paper watermarked 1799, that sold at £600 in a Thomson Roddick (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale.

Despite some minor loss to the head of 'When We Were Very Young', published in 1924 and a first edition of what are now collectively known as the ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books, overall the set pictured below is an exceptionally well-preserved one.

Our regular listings of British and Irish book auctions.

Associations including Queen Victoria’s daughter help to boost 17th century manuscript.

Beneath the famous anchor and dolphin device that denotes a product of the Aldine presses in Venice, the final leaf of a 1516 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses below bears an inscription that reveals the reason this little work in its later vellum binding sold at £6000.

Top lot in a June 6 sale of maps, natural history and other colour plate books held in New York was a rare map by Lewis Evans of what were then still the ‘Middle British Colonies’ in America.

No record exists of any signed, autograph letter in the hand of Mao Zedong being previously sold on the international market, said Sotheby’s (25/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) of the example it offered as part of a June 11 sale of manuscripts, Continental books and music.

The Hammerhead shark plate shown below is not as colourful as many of the other 432 featured in a generally fine and complete copy of Marcus Elieser Bloch’s Ichthyologie… sold recently, but certainly one of the more eye-catching.

Our listing of British and Irish book auctions taking place from July 23-August 3, 2019.

A Colin Dexter first brought one of the higher bids at Keys (20% buyer’s premium) of Aylsham in its June 13-14 sale.

An 1841 guide to London’s ladies of the night sold by Hansons for £3300 featured recently in ATG (No 2390), and one of the many rarities that emerged from the recent Gloucestershire sale of the late Martin Orsky’s library was a group of four 18th century broadsides advertising prostitutes.

Our listing of British and Irish book auctions taking place from July 16-27, 2019.

Stand-out lot in a recent Irish sale was one of the 100 special copies of Ulysses printed on Dutch handmade paper by Van Gelder that James Joyce signed on publication in Paris in 1922.

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.