Though not in the best of conditions, The Experienced Fowler: or, the Gentleman’s Recreation of 1704 by John Smith was otherwise complete and included a coloured woodcut frontispiece, along with three further woodcut illustrations.
The work also includes a manuscript footnote on one page regarding ‘Bat-Fowling’, something which “must be done on a very dark night when there is no wind”.
In 2006 at Christie’s, as part of a major sale held for the Duke of Gloucester, a 1697 first edition that was once in the library of the hunting and hawking bibliographer CFGR Schwerdt made £4800.
Curiosities corner
Another highlight of this Staffordshire sale of April 11, The Swell’s Night Guide, featured in ATG No 2390, but many other rare or curious items were on offer.
Bid to £9300 was an unusual job lot of polar interest. The principal attractions comprised signed, presentation copies of a 1930, single volume US edition of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Antarctic masterpiece, The Worst Journey in the World, and one of 75 copies of The Diary of W. Lashly.
The latter is a famous rarity that was produced principally as a practical exercise for University of Reading fine art department students under the guidance of William Lashly, a lecturer who as a young petty officer in the Royal Navy had served on both of Scott’s Antarctic expeditions.
Both were gifts to Alice M Gaines, the vendor’s mother, who told Jim Spencer, Hansons’ book specialist that “Cherry was my unofficial godfather”.
The two other works that made up the lot were an inscribed copy of George Seaver’s Edward Wilson of the Antarctic of 1935, and what Hansons called an unusual book by Seaver consisting solely of a ‘Foreword about Cherry-Garrard’. The latter was published after AC-G’s death in 1959.
An enormous collection of editions of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler was offered in some 130 or more lots, many of them multiples. It totalled around £10,000, but the earliest of the copies offered, a fourth edition of 1668, did not sell.
Sold at £2100 was a ticket allowing the bearer entrance to St Paul’s for the funeral of Lord Nelson.
