Books & Periodicals

Mathematical work makes £300,000 in auction where composers also feature heavily

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from September 1-16, 2020.

Rare book specialist Hamish Riley-Smith, who died on August 10, did not originally intend to become a dealer.

Bernard Shapero of Shapero Rare Books is among the newcomers to the Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair (September 11-13) this year.

Extensively interleaved with scholarly notes and running to over 700pp, a Japanese and English Dictionary compiled by JC Hepburn was a notable rarity in a Cornish summer sale.

MADAM – I note with interest that the Firsts London rare book fair is on the move again (News, ATG No 2454).

PBFA (Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association) has held four monthly online book fairs, with the fifth going live to the public at noon on Saturday, August 29. Up to 15 books/items can be put up for sale by each bookseller member.

Edition of Macbeth that once belonged to actor Charlton Heston.

The two ink drawings reproduced here both made substantial sums in a June 27 sale of comic strip artwork held in Paris by Artcurial.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Sold at £140,000 in the first of two early manuscript sales held by Bloomsbury Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 8 was a lot featured in the front page story in ATG No 2447.

Featured in Previews, ATG No 2449, was an amusing illustration of the Vacuum Tube, a proposed new means of mass transport from the pages of the Glasgow Looking Glass, a publication that has come to be widely regarded as the world’s first comic.

Firsts of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have made as much as £115,000* at auction.

A number of higher-priced lots featured in a sale held by Hindman (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of Chicago this summer, where fine binding was very much in evidence on both individual volumes and sets.

Spread over two days and running to 600 lots, a very mixed sale held by Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) included Oscar Wilde’s 'The Importance of being Earnest' as one of the literary high spots.

Arnold ‘Jake’ Johnson’s library of thousands of volumes covering travel, big game hunting – the focus of the three lots featured here – sporting and other fields is being dispersed by Doyle (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) in various live and online auctions in New York.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions, August 18-September 3, 2020.

Each bearing estimates of £300-400, two lots in a summer online auction held by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) brought substantially higher rewards.