They were sent to auction by a descendant of Gladwyn MR Turbutt, who was killed in action during the First World War.
In 1905 he had taken the family’s First Folio Shakespeare into the Bodleian to seek advice on getting its binding repaired – only to find that it was their original deposit copy, one that in the 17th century had been misguidedly deaccessioned and replaced with a Third Folio. It was eventually to return to the library from which it had carelessly been allowed to stray.
Many of these Turbutt family books made four-figure sums, but the most expensive of them was a copy of the woodcut-illustrated, first separate edition of Coverdale’s English version of the New Testament, printed by Matthew Crom in Antwerp in 1538.
It was incomplete but in a modern binding of full crushed morocco it sold at £14,100.
Gill gospels
Bid to £7700 was one of 500 copies of the 1931, Golden Cockerel edition of The Four Gospels... with wood engraved illustrations and initials by Eric Gill.
In its Sangorski & Sutcliffe binding of half-white pigskin and buckram boards, it bore the bookplate of a well-known bibliographic scholar and collector, Wynne Jeudwine. When Bloomsbury Book Auctions sold his library in 1984 the price was £2100.
