The Book of the Omar Khayyam Club – £1500 at Cheffins.
Part of a Cheffins (22.5/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) sale, they were led at £1500 by one of 185 copies of The Book of the Omar Khayyam Club produced in 1910 for private circulation among club members. Bound in Persian style, it is signed with Gladstone’s initials.
It has been suggested in a well-known, US-based dealer’s catalogue that Gladstone may have had his books bound by a local craftsman but then did the finishing, the hand tooling, himself.
The sale was led at £8500 by an ex- Royal Veterinary College library copy of the 1766 first edition of George Stubbs’ Anatomy of the Horse.
A 1945 first of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited featured in the Previews, ATG No 2399, sold at £650.
