Books & Periodicals

Original watercolours intended for pioneering, unpublished work are now highly valued

Bid to £32,000 in a Gloucestershire auction was a 1599, first Latin edition of the Dutch traveller and explorer, Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Navigatio ac itinerarium…

Work featuring the boy wizard Harry Potter is a familiar sight at the PBFA’s annual Christmas event

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

A rare work by William Lambarde, the antiquarian, writer on legal subjects and author of the first county history, A Perambulation of Kent of 1576, was another highlight from the library of the late Eric Stanley, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (see reports in previous ATGs).

While the binding, with Charles Ricketts’ familiar gilt design on the front cover, is not in the best of conditions, an inscription on the half-title of this example of one of the 250 large paper copies of Oscar Wilde’s 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' published by Ward Lock in 1891 ensured that it set an auction record.

The latest delay to Brexit was not a source of cheer for overseas vendors at the ABA’s Chelsea Rare Book Fair on November 1-2.

Instruction from author Fleming was thankfully not followed and first issue survives.

One of the biggest surprises at Nagel’s (33% buyer’s premium) sale in Stuttgart on October 16-17 came right at the end of the auction.

“There is no such thing as modern art, there is only art and it is perpetual.” The author of these lines was, perhaps surprisingly, the highly modern Austrian painter Egon Schiele and are part of an artistic manifesto written on July 17, 1911.

Our weekly selection from salerooms.

Drizen Dickens lots notch up notable results despite some higher-value unsolds.

Bid to a record £20,000 at a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 26 was a beautifully bound example of Piranesi’s Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis.

Sold for a record $2750 (£2220) at PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) in California on October 10 was an inscribed copy of The World Set Free, a prophetic novel by HG Wells.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

First work in photographer’s classic coverage of China and its people makes £48,000.

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.