The Mallams catalogue notes suggest that this copy of Sir Henry Chauncy’s Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire may have lacked some pages and possibly a couple of plates, but it boasted a fine red morocco gilt binding by Rivière. Once in the collections of the 3rd Baron Rothschild, who gifted it to the consignor’s father in 1988, it sold at £7800.
Among them were books noted by Mallams (25% buyer’s premium) as having once been part of the libraries of the Irish writer and poet TW Rolleston and his fellow countryman, cleric and writer, the Rev Stopford A Brooke.
Among the more successful of them, at £4600 rather than the £150-250 initially suggested, was a copy of Walt Whitman’s Complete Poems and Prose 1855-88 that bore a presentation inscription to Rolleston from their creator.
A four-piece lot that included a 1900 Book of Irish Verse with introduction and notes by WB Yeats, who had inscribed this particular copy to Brooke, sold at £1700.
Condition was not a strong point in the case of a July 1890, English issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine that included the initial publication of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but it sold at £1200.
From what appear to have been other properties came a signed, 1926 first in original boards of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, which sold at £1500, and the lot pictured here.
