Books & Periodicals

Illuminated manuscript sales of recent times will be the subject of a future review, but seen here is something a little different in that line offered as the very first lot in a December 1 sale of such material held by Bloomsbury Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

A copy of WB Yeats’ The Wanderings of Oisin… offered in a recent Irish sale was an example of Fisher Unwin’s 1892 second issue. That is rare enough, but this copy bore an inscription that made it very special indeed.

A notable feature of the end-of-year book sales in 2018 was the number of online auctions held by the major salerooms.

Packed with a varied selection of precisely 1000 lots, a very thick catalogue rounded off one saleroom’s year in a December 11-12 sale.

Showing hardly any signs of wear and signed by JK Rowling – and originally acquired at a special signing at Harrods, as revealed by a laid-in ticket – a near pristine first issue copy of 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone' of 1997, appeared at auction earlier this month.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from January 4-31, 2019.

Penguin patties, seal cutlets and roast reindeer – and lots of whisky – were on the menu for a famous meal which was followed by ‘Sledges at 12.30’.

Russian literary firsts and related manuscripts were the focus of one of the many major sales held in the UK, Europe and the US at the year’s end.

Featuring 17 lithographed illustrations by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of 100 special copies of Gustave Geoffroy’s 1894 homage to the celebrated singer, actress and, in later years, writer, Yvette Guilbert – all of which were signed by the chanteuse – is shown here.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from December 18-January 17, 2018.

Packed with job lots in many categories, the book section of a three-day antiques auction held at Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) in the Cumbrian market town of Cockermouth heralded an intent to make such sales a regular feature.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of the Marie Roget’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’ are among now famous works that are to be found in the newly discovered first issue copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales shown below.

Written just a year before his death in 1955, a famous two-page letter in which Albert Einstein put down his thoughts on religion, his Jewish identity and his own search for the meaning of life sold for $2.4m (£1.89m) in a New York auction on December 4.

Literary high spots of a Bonhams (25/10/12% buyer’s premium) sale of November 27 included a three-volume, 1813 first of Jane Austen’s 'Pride and Prejudice'.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from December 11-20, 2018.

Arthur Saul’s Famous Game of Chesse-Play…, the first published book on the game written by an Englishman, came out in 1614.

Along with Pallas’ 'Flora Russica', the 'Icones Plantarum novarum… floram Rossicam' of the German-Estonian botanist Carl Friedrich von Ledebour is recognised as one of the great works on Russian flora.

Dated 1536 and printed in Antwerp, a defective copy of what is known as the ‘mole’ edition of Tyndale’s Newe Testament – so called from the mole (or perhaps hedgehog) depicted on a stone on which St Paul’s foot is resting in one of the many woodcut illustrations – made £30,000 in a recent London sale.