Books & Periodicals

An edition of Queen Victoria’s Leaves from the Journal of our Life on the Highlands… took £550 at a Mallams (25% buyer’s premium) sale of September 23.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions

Vienna antiquarian bookseller Michael Steinbach is celebrating 50 years in the business and has produced a catalogue to mark the milestone.

Though the dust jacket featuring one of Pauline Baynes’ illustrations for the book is torn with loss and exhibits a number of patched repairs, a 1950 first edition of 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' did sell for £1100 against a guide of £500-700 on October 6 at Buckinghamshire saleroom Bourne End Auctions (17.5% buyer’s premium).

First and only published volume of South American work appears in London saleroom

Two leading book dealers have come together to jointly buy the eponymous William Reese Company and its 40,000 stock of books.

A first edition of 'Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith was one of the star sales at Firsts: London’s Rare Book Fair, which was back up to full power for its second staging at the Saatchi Gallery.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Illustrated here is a complete deck of James Moxon’s ‘Geometrical’ cards, each bearing figures of scientific instruments and dating from the mid-1690s.

Collection gathered in by a local farmer comes to auction in North Yorkshire

Very much the star turn in a Philadelphia sale of September 21 was an extremely rare copy of 'New Englands First Fruits…', a small quarto work, running to just 26pp, that was printed and published in London in 1643.

Boasting what have been described as the first accurate anatomical illustrations of the foetus in utero among its 39 engraved plates, a 1761, second edition of William Smellie’s 'Sett of Anatomical Tables… of the Practice of Midwifery' was one of the highlights of an online-only Forum (25/20/12.5% buyers premium) sale of September 15.

Early views of the city now known as Kolkata reveal 19th development under empire

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Inscribed to her husband and fellow poet, Ted Hughes, the dedication copy of the first and only collection of Sylvia Plath’s verses to be published in her lifetime, The Colossus and other Poems, sold for a record £75,000.

The latest in a series of auctions to draw on the private library of one of the more prominent antiquarian book dealers of his generation, William S Reese (1955-2018), ran from September 1-14 at Christie’s New York (26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium).