Books & Periodicals

“It’s not often we offer for sale a library of nearly 200 volumes by the same publisher as a single lot – and certainly not one that fits in a small suitcase.”

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Potter & Potter’s Fine Literature & Modern Firsts Sale on April 26 in Chicago includes a copy of Oscar Wilde’s (1854-1900) The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Many of the lots in an Oxford sale of February 23 formed part of the estate of Canadian linguistic and literary scholar, the late ‘Paddy’ Docker-Drysdale.

Billed as the star lot in a sale that ended on February 27, a scarce copy of the 1937 first issue of Dandy made a high-estimate £3450.

California dealership Denenberg Fine Arts has sold a full set of 80 prints from the Jugendstil magazine PAN to Chicago’s Driehaus Museum.

Running to 63 photographs, a virtually complete set of those produced for Carleton Watkins’ 1863 publication '…Photographic Views of the Falls and Valley of Yosemite' in Mariposa County, California featured in a January 27 sale at Nate D Sanders (25% buyer’s premium) of Los Angeles.

The latest Photographica sale at Chiswick Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) included this rare set of 'China Through the Stereoscope'.

The best-seller at $400,003 (£296,300)* in a recent sale at RR Auction was a doubly signed receipt in which Johann Sebastian Bach acknowledges payment of the sum of five guilders under the terms of Sabina Nathan’s legacy.

Sold online at £5500 in a February 2 sale held by Catherine Southon (24% buyer’s premium) at Farleigh Court Golf Club in Surrey was a copy in full mottled calf gilt of the first European edition of the works of Confucius (551-479BC).

Venetian edition of Commedia, lunar map and account of Polar voyages surface in Milan.

News earlier this month of the discovery of Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition ship, in the icy waters of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, will surely have made the hearts of dealers and collectors of polar material beat a little faster.

Our regular listing of upcoming British and Irish book sales.

Anonymous complete edition from 1696-97 is now recognised as the work of Mary Astell

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Formed by a local man, the late Brian Ferguson, a collection of over 40 books issued by the Golden Cockerel Press featured in an auction held by Thomson Roddick (18% buyer’s premium) of Carlisle.

The two signed photo-portraits of writers reproduced here formed part of a November 17-December 1 sale held by Christie’s (15/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) that dispersed a single-owner collection of literary manuscripts billed as Exiles and Idealists.

One of the stand-out lots at Sotheby’s New York (26/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) was a 1949 first printing of The Intelligent Investor.