Books and works on paper
AS the deadline for this final, double-dated issue of the year arrived, a number of good English, European and US book sales were yet to take place.
However, many more had filled the calendar throughout November and December, delivering some exceptional results along with some disappointments.
Lots from some of those sales have already featured on these pages – for example, the November 29 Sotheby’s sale that set a world record of £3.9m for any musical manuscript was noted last week (ATG No 2271).
New Year issues will cover a rich crop of end-of-year book, manuscript and related auctions.
Offered here is a glimpse at the range of material that has so far passed through the rooms but there is much, much more to come.
USA
Two lots from the December 5 Sotheby’s New York sale of the remarkable collection of bibles formed by Dr Charles Rylie were illustrated in an ATG No 2269 preview.
The 15th century vellum manuscript of John Wycliffe’s English translation of the New Testament doubled expectations selling to a US collector at $1.4m (£1.1m) and the copy of John Eliot’s famous ‘Indian Bible’ of the 1660s reached $220,000 (£173,800).
The top lot in a sale held the following day in the same rooms could hardly have been more different. Bid to a low-estimate $300,000 (£236,220) was the log kept by Captain Theodore ’Dutch’ Van Kirk, the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B29 Superfortress that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In 2007 it had been sold by Heritage at exactly the same sum.
A History of Science & Technology sale held by Bonhams New York on December 7 included good Newton, Einstein and Darwin lots, but the big money maker at $380,000 (£301,590) was a rare version of the famous Enigma cipher machines developed in Germany during the Second World War.
Dating from 1943 and still fully operational, this was an M4 naval version, ordered for submarine use by Admiral Doenitz, who had come to believe (correctly) that security of the earlier M3 models had been compromised.
United Kingdom
A third of the lots in the second portion of the Giancarlo Beltrame scientific library, offered by Christie’s on November 30, were left unsold. However, one exceptional book is discussed in the ‘Fermat…’ story on the facing page and others will be noted in a later issue.
Star turn in the King Street saleroom’s December 1 auction was a rare and complete first edition of a collection of 13th century German epic poetry known as the Heldenbuch.
One of only nine recorded copies of the edition printed c.1479 by Johann Prüss of Strasbourg, and the only complete example still in private hands, it contains 230 wood-cut illustrations from 156 blocks, three of them full-page and all unique to this work.
In a contemporary, probably Westphalian binding of blind-stamped calf over wooden boards, it was last seen in 1991, when in the same rooms it reached £320,000.
It was not a great year’s end for illuminated manuscripts, with the major lots in the opening section of the Christie’s sale of December 1 mostly left unsold – as was the seven-figure prize entry in the dedicated manuscript sale held by Sotheby’s on December 6.
The ‘Bute Hours’, a famous and lavishly illustrated English manuscript of c.1500-20 that last came to auction in 1983, when it made £140,000 in the same rooms, had this time been valued at £1.5-2.5m.
France
November 8-9 brought the second of the Pierre Bergé/Sotheby’s sales in Paris, and though one or two best-sellers have already been been noted in these pages, a further selection will appear in a forthcoming issue.
On December 15, in the same rooms, one of just seven specially bound, autograph copies of JK Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard – illustrated and described in a preview piece in ATG No 2268 – sold at £300,000.
In a second Christie’s Paris sale of December 5, called Peintres et Poetes, €180,000 (£151,200) was bid for a fine copy of Blaise Cendrars’ La Prose de Transsiberien… of 1913 with its vivid decorations by Sonia Delaunay.
