Bid to £700 in the Aylsham rooms of Keys (20% buyer’s premium) was a signed copy of Loyalties…, a collection of the poems of John Drinkwater, illustrated by Paul Nash, published by the Beaumont Press in 1918.
A ‘Special’ copy of the 1956, Golden Cockerel edition of Historia Apolloni Regis Tyri, a translation by Paul Turner of an anonymous work that has been called the most popular romance of the Middle Ages, sold at £980.
This was was one of 30 copies containing an extra set of the engraved illustrations by Mark Severin, among them one not featured in the book.
Elsewhere at the December 10-11 sale, a much higher than predicted bid was required to secure a work by the Nobel prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindrinath Tagore (1861-1941).
With an introduction by WB Yeats and engraved portrait frontispiece by William Rothenstein, Gitanjali (Song Offerings) was published in 1912 by the Chiswick Press for the India Society.
Auction records show a copy in a special Sangorski & Sutcliffe binding that made £1400, but this was a copy in the original and now soiled cloth binding. Estimated at just £30-50, it sold instead for £880.
