Books & Periodicals

MADAM – I sympathise with your correspondent Phil Higginbotham (Letters, ATG No 2335), who decries booksellers’ notes on endpapers.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from March 26-April 5, 2018.

None of the works by the Elizabethan poet, courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) were actually published in his lifetime.

'Busman’s Honeymoon: A Love Story with Detective Interruptions' was the 11th and last of the Dorothy L Sayers books featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

Aldine press books of the early 16th century, mostly it seems in a good but much later full morocco or calf bindings, produced a number of the higher bids in a recent Yorkshire sale.

MADAM – I did a double – no, triple – take when I read the article ‘First Doctor Who script up at auction’ in ATG No 2332.

A signed and dated 1839 first (second issue) of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby was one of many lots in a Heritage (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of March 7 that came from the library of James Seacrest, a Nebraska publisher and philanthropist, that were sold to benefit charities.

Cartographic rarities showed the way to strong results at the Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) saleroom.

MADAM – Have sellers of antiquarian books never considered the use of ‘Post-it’ notes? Do they not realise that pencil scribbles actually devalue the product that they are trying to sell?

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from March 20-29, 2018.

A first English edition of Charlotte Bernhardi’s translation of her father, Admiral Krusenstern’s Memoir… of his 1803-06 circumnavigation of the globe was one of the rarer items offered at Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium) on February 20.

The first week of March ended with a flurry of sales in both the UK and the US. Together they brought a number of exceptional results.

Early children’s books, many from a single collection formed by the late Mary Joy Sanger, provided a principal attraction in a February 27 sale held in Penzance by David Lay (18% buyer’s premium).

A previously unknown copy of the Golden Age comic that heralds the arrival of Batman sold for a premium-inclusive $569,000 (£410,000) in York, Pennsylvania last week.

An 80-lot James Bond collection offeredin a recent Lincolnshire sale had been formed over a 40-year period.

A number of books on plastic surgery featured in a recent Californian sale including an 1833, first English edition of Johann F Dieffenbach’s Surgical Observations on the Restoration of the Nose.

One highlight of a February 20 sale held in Italy was the handsome, armorially bound 1694 first edition of the Swiss born architect Carlo Fontana’s Templum Vaticanum.

‘Rock Star’ of physics and Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, habitually refused to sign copies of his books, telling his editor: “I’m not going to go on TV and I’m not going to sign any books!”