Book

A beautifully preserved 1937 first state copy of Tolkien’s 'The Hobbit' sold for £35,000 at Forum Auctions.

Shown below is one of 20 hand-coloured plates from 'Masken des Römischen Carnevals'. This was a rare and separate 1790 Weimar issue of the plates that illustrated a work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Roman carnivals published the previous year – an item that is itself a great rarity*.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from June 4-16, 2018.

Much of Thomas Chippendale’s renown is thanks to his forward-thinking approach to business in the first decades of consumerism – and in particular the creation of a pioneering catalogue of furniture designs in the style of the great architectural books of the period.

Boasting a new name and venue, the ABA’s annual book fair seems poised to expand its reach to a wider range of clients while retaining its strong exhibitor base.

Likely to be the rarest and most expensive book available at the PBFA’s 'London Antiquarian Book Fair' is a copy of 'Caractères' by the French philosopher and satirist Jean de La Bruyère.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from May 15-25, 2018.

Kelmscott’s finest achievement is probably its edition of 'The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer'. It is described in Printing and the Mind of Man as “perfect… both in design and in the quality of the printing”.

Limited to 111 copies (105 on paper and six on vellum), ‘The Ashendene Dante’ is the rarest of the three magnum opi of the English private press movement.

ATG's pick of books and works on paper recently sold at auction...

In the bicentenery year of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Gothic genre continues to capture the popular imagination, writes Kate Quill.

The photobook genre is almost as old as photography itself and can be collected at all price points, as Bonhams’ Matthew Haley reports.

A volume containing Richard Hooker’s sixth and eighth books dealing with The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Policy… is a 1651 re-issue of an edition first published three years earlier. The principal attraction, however, was the armorial binding.

Published in 1895, Wright & Dixon’s Guide to American Golf… was one of the very first books on the game to appear in that country. A copy sold on April 12 in San Francisco for $42,500 (£29,930) was billed as “perhaps the only copy extant”.

First such pocket atlas published in England leads a look at highly diverse auction selection

The English-born political theorist Thomas Paine lived through the most turbulent of times.

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.