Theatre d’Agriculture et Mesnages des Champs, $11,000 (£8360) at Butterscotch.
Divided into eight books, it includes information on viticulture, gardens, food, crops, and livestock.
The author, Olivier de Serres, Seigneur du Pradel (1539-1619), was an early advocate of crop rotation and had 20,000 mulberry bushes planted in the Tuilleries Gardens to increase the breeding of silkworms.
The first edition printing offered as part of the Butterscotch (22% buyer’s premium) summer estates auction in Pound Ridge, New York on July 16, came from the Greenwich, Connecticut collection of Carl and Shirley Sontheimer. They were founders of the American cookware brand Cuisinart and noted cookbook collectors.
Theatre d’Agriculture et Mesnages des Champs, $11,000 (£8360) at Butterscotch.
Housed in a restored early leather binding, it was rated a fine copy retaining the title page by Flemish engraver Karen van Mallery, the woodcut vignettes that head each of the eight volumes and 16 woodcut illustrations of parterres (formal garden layouts).
The example sold as part of the Lawes Agricultural Library at Forum in 2018 made £6500. This US copy, offered with a guide of $2000-4000, took $11,000 (£8360).
Dickens' Vanity Fair copy
First edition copy of Vanity Fair owned by Charles Dickens, $15,000 (£11,400) at Butterscotch.
From a North Salem, New York estate came a first edition copy of Vanity Fair (1848) that included the book plate of Charles Dickens and the label for his country home Gads Hill Place dated June 1870.
An extra memorandum signed by Charles Scribner on the note paper of US publisher Scribner & Sons states: “This copy of ‘Vanity Fair’ is from the library of Charles Dickens and bought especially for us by our agent in London.”
Housed in a red Morocco leather slip case, it was estimated at $4000-6000 and sold at $15,000 (£11,400).
Like many of Dickens’ own novels, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial and then published by Bradbury & Evans in book form in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero.
