On February 15, however, Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) held a further sale of 96 ‘remaining’ lots from that superb collection.
Most were new to auction, but among them were a number that had not sold at Sotheby’s and were re-appearing here with modified estimates. This time everything sold, giving the saleroom launched only last year its first ‘white-glove’ auction.
Among that large group of first-timers, one notable success was an 1886, Sydney first of the botanist and plant-hunter, William Bauerlen’s Voyage of the Bonito: an Account of the Fly River Expedition to New Guinea.
A slim, 38pp work modern half morocco, but with the original printed wrappers bound in, it would appear to be the only copy so far seen at auction. Valued at £200- 300, it sold instead at £2800.
There were a number of books in which big-game hunting was a principal attraction. Two are noted with the accompanying illustrations, but another, a work by H Anderson Bryden, was also a notable success.
Bryden’s best known and most frequently encountered book is Great and Small Game of Africa of 1899, but sold here for a record £1000 was a copy of an earlier work, Gun and Camera in Southern Africa.
Sub-titled A Year of Wanderings in Bechuanaland, the Kalahari Desert, and the Lake River Country, Ngamiland and illustrated with 24 plates and a folding map, this was a superb uncut and unopened copy. In the original pictorial grey cloth, it had a medallion of a zebra’s head in brown on the upper cover.
Complete with the exceptionally rare volume of plates, an 1847 presentation first of George Everest’s Account of the Measurement of Two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India, left unsold on a £3000-5000 valuation in 2014, was this time sold at £2400. Everest, who lent his name to the mountain (in the English-speaking world at least) was superintendent to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.
This copy, inscribed at the order of the East India Company for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, had made $4250 (then about £2360) in 1991 as part of the Sotheby’s New York sale of the Richard Manney library.
The Melancholy Narrative of the Distressful Voyage and Miraculous Deliverance of Captain David Harrison, of the Sloop, Peggy… is a 1766 account of an American ship, adrift for several weeks in the north Atlantic, whose crew turned to cannibalism. They drew lots to decide who would die and one unfortunate crew member had been eaten before the Peggy was found and brought to safety in New York.
The Brooke-Hitching first, in modern half brown morocco, sold at £2200 – roughly half the earlier low estimate.
One lot that on this second outing all but equalled the original high estimate in selling at £2400 was a volume that brought together in a contemporary calf gilt binding two items relating to Captain WE Parry’s account of his 1819-20 voyage in search of the North-west Passage.
An 1824 Supplement to the Appendix… of Parry’s original account of 1824, dealing with natural history and illustrated with six plates, was bound with copies of The North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, the weekly newspaper produced by the crew to “assist in enlivening the tedious and inactive months of winter”.
Both bore presentation inscriptions by Parry to Acheson Maxwell, a diplomat and civil servant.
