Books and works on paper
It comes from a famous and pioneering photographic work by Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion…, or as the extended title explains, …An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.
A large oblong folio production, published in Philadelphia in 1887, its pages feature stop-motion photographs of men, women, children and animals.
This example bears the stamps of the Museum of Edinburgh (Science & Art) to the title and verso of the plates, as well as a further (cancelled) Royal Scottish Museum stamp to the title, and has been rebound in modern red moroccco-backed cloth.
It sold for a record £75,000.
Pictured here are just a few frames of a sequence showing a woman leaping over a chair, but fencers, horse riders, elephants, cats, birds in flight, even naked cricketers feature in Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs for Animal Locomotion…
The work was sponsored by and published for the University of Pennsylvania.
Monumental private press achievement
Published by the Pear Tree Press in 1928, in an edition of just 55 copies, Frescoes from Buried Temples is a portfolio of intaglio and woodcut illustrations after drawings by the founder of the press, James J Guthrie, who also designed and printed the complete work.
His illustrations accompany poems by Gordon Bottomley that are printed in calligraphic text after Helen Hinckley.
It was the most ambitious work produced by Guthrie, and the bookseller, collector, bibliographer and writer, Colin Franklin, once described the work as “…among the three or four monumental achievements of private presses in the twentieth century; and by its originality of concept and content, the highest”.
Loose as issued in the original pictorial coloured wrapper depicting Adam and Eve with the serpent, a copy offered by Dominic Winter on December 15 sold at a record £3400 (below).
