Books & Periodicals

A selection of stand-out results achieved at auctions in the UK and abroad.

ATG’s timeline chronicling the history of book dealing associations from 1906 to 2016…

A new generation of dealers, auctioneers and fair organisers is keen to show there is a thriving future for the trade.

From the earliest days a common bond has bound the antiquarian book trade together. And, more than ever, professional standards matter.

A selection of forthcoming UK and international auction highlights.

Tom Lintern-Mole has just finished filming a video in his shop to advertise the latest book fair on YouTube.

No fewer than 840 lots were offered in the bumper April 5-6 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium). The most successful of them, at a record £32,000, was a presentation copy of a pioneering work that has been described as “the first practical statement of socialist doctrine”, Robert Owen’s A New View of Society… of 1813-14.

Tintin has had another good day out in Paris. In an Artcurial sale on April 8 a European collector paid €753,000 (£643,815), including premiums and taxes, to buy an ink drawing done by Hergé for the 1937 comic book Tintin in America.

A major attraction in a PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) sale of April 6 was the Samuel Hessel ‘DNA’ collection of scientific papers, journals and books.

A Beatrix Potter collection running to 62 lots got a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of March 30 up and running.

Offered by Keys (20% buyer’s premium) on April 6, the Sir Malcolm Arnold Collection proved to be a problematic one.

Published in 1631 in Rinteln, a small town in Lower Saxony, Friederich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus Contra Sagas is a first edition in much later boards of a book that has been described as the first serious attack on witchcraft trials and their use of torture.

A collection of ethical maxims, proverbs and moral reflections compiled by Solomon ibn Gabirol and translated from the Arabic by Judah ibn Tibbon was printed for the first time in Venice in 1484 as Mivchar HaPeninim (Choice Pearls).

Otto von Guericke’s Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) magdeburgica de vacuo spatio… of 1672 describes the experiments in which he produced an air pump able to create a vacuum and thus demonstrate the pressure exerted by our atmosphere.

A carte-de-visite album of the 1860s containing a previously unknown photograph of the abolitionist heroine Harriet Tubman was one of the high points of the March 30 sale held by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).