One of the few surviving 1666 first edition copies of The English Vineyard Vindicated…, by John Evelyn and John Rose, £11,000 at Chiswick Auctions.
One of the earliest works on English viticulture sold for £11,000 at Chiswick Auctions (26% buyer’s premium).
The specialist Books and Works on Paper sale on May 14 included one of the few surviving copies of The English Vineyard Vindicated…, by John Evelyn and John Rose.
Published in 1666, it is thought that most copies perished in the Great Fire of London. This rare survivor has an ink correction that is probably in Evelyn’s own hand.
Among the many subjects John Evelyn (1620-1706) wrote about, horticulture became an increasing obsession. He published several translations of French gardening books, and his Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest Trees (1664) was highly influential in its plea to landowners to plant trees, of which he believed the country to be dangerously short.
Evelyn’s book on viticulture - with the input of ‘Gardner to his Majesty at St James’, the aptly named John Rose - offers advice on growing vines in the English climate at a time when England was a major consumer of wine but a very minor grower and producer.
It includes a double-page engraved plate of the ordering and binding of vines. This particular copy includes an ink correction in the author’s own hand changing the word ‘strong’ on the third line of page 5 to ‘stony’. The same amendment is made to the copy held at Cambridge University Library.
One of the few surviving 1666 first edition copies of The English Vineyard Vindicated…, by John Evelyn and John Rose, £11,000 at Chiswick Auctions.
Published for John Crook ‘at the Ship in St. Paul’s Church-Yard’, The English Vineyard Vindicated was printed some time before September 2-6, 1666 when an inferno destroyed much of medieval London - including the Old St Paul’s Cathedral.
A second edition was produced in 1669 as part of a publication including Evelyn’s translation of Le Jardinier Francois by Nicolas de Bonnefons that features a tract on making and ordering of wines in France.
Chiswick Auctions’ estimate on its first edition had been £3000-4000. Another copy made $18,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2015 as part of the collection of Robert Pirie.
Healthy living
Thomas Tryon, The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, £1300 at Chiswick Auctions.
Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness is considered a pioneering work in English on vegetarianism.
Tryon (1634-1703), an English sugar merchant and Anabaptist, began writing on a wide range of subjects, including education, nutrition, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, when he returned from Barbados in 1669.
First issued in 1683, The Way to Health… was the most widely read of the 27 books he published. Advocating a life without meat, it includes the first known use of the word “rights” in regard to animals. A copy of the first edition, with occasional early marginal annotations in ink and a restored contemporary panelled calf binding, sold at Chiswick for £1300.
First edition of John Keats’ Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems including an illustration that may depict Keats’ House in Hampstead, £6500 at Chiswick Auctions.
Hammered at £6500 (estimate £3000-5000) was a first edition of John Keats’ Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems. Published in July 1820, less than a year before his death from tuberculosis in Rome, this was Keats’ last and most important book, which includes some of his best-loved poems including Ode to a Nightengale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche and Ode to Melancholy.
Housed in contemporary quarter sheep over marbled boards, this copy has a presentation annotation regarding the East India Company to front endpaper and to the rear endpaper a naive contemporary pencil sketch that the cataloguer suggested (perhaps hopefully) might be an image of Keats’ House in Hampstead. n
