Books & Periodicals

Billed as “the world’s most valuable illustrated book”, the ex-Duke of Portland set of Audubon’s Birds of America offered by Christie’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was sold for $8.3m (£6.24m), a price only once bettered at auction.

Camels are the linking theme of the two lots illustrated here, so a verse by Ogden Nash copied below seems to fit the bill.

For many years now, German Enigma code machines have been making big, sums at auction, but in the Bonhams New York June 12 sale a slim codebook relating to their use also prompted a much, much higher than expected and six-figure bid.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from June 26-July 7, 2018.

The earliest publication in any form of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar came with its inclusion as part of the 1623 First Folio, and in a recent US sale a bound set of the 22pp that it occupied in that great work prompted a six-figure bid.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from June 19-29, 2018.

Bound together, first editions of both parts of the 1679-83 edition of Maria Sybilla Merian’s study of caterpillars and their transformation into butterflies, Der Raupen…, sold to a Danish bidder for €42,000 (£32,060) in a sale held by Ketterer Kunst (23% buyer’s premium) of Hamburg.

In the books, maps and prints supplement in ATG No 2341, Pom Harrington of Harrington Rare Books observed that millennials are now looking at books and thinking they are “cool”.

Consisting of just two autograph leaves, but catalogued as “one of the most important fragments still in private hands”, a manuscript dating from the last years of Mozart’s short life topped a recent London music sale.

In 1930, Jonathan Swift’s 18th century satirical book Gulliver’s Travels was republished by Cresset Press with a suite of illustrations by the British artist Rex Whistler (1905-44).

Early manuscript compilations for medical and culinary recipes feature quite regularly and successfully at auction, but an example in a recent London sale was one with a morbid statistical addition that achieved a treble-estimate £15,000.

The Federalist…, a collection of essays first published in New York newspapers in the years immediately following independence, is today recognised as a seminal work on American political theory and a cornerstone of constitutional governance.

St Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei (below) was penned to counter pagan claims that what had prompted the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410 was the adoption of Christianity by its emperors. The book was first printed around a thousand years later in the 1460s, but it was 150 years before a first English language edition appeared.

The parent company of recently launched Mayfair Philatelic Auctions has announced it will also be holding regular auctions of books and prints, writes Roland Arkell.

Written in red ink on four sheets, the original draft script of Ronnie Barker’s famous ‘Fork Handles’ TV sketch of 1976 has been sold for £28,000.

It was a four-page Mozart manuscript of an unfinished Allegro in G for piano and four hands that led the Sotheby’s (25/10/12.9% buyers’ premium) sales of May 22.

It was in December 2014 that Sotheby’s put an estimate of £100,000-150,000 on what it called at the time “probably the most famous and evocative illustration of the 20th century”.