Collectables

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.

Germany’s most expensive painting sold at auction, an unusual early firearm and a fin de siècle snake charmer are among the highlights featured here from recent auctions in Munich, Berlin and Cologne.

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.

The long-running Antique Scientific Instrument Fair has been given a boost by the Scientific Instrument Society (SIS).

Two notable single-owner collections, augmented by items from the round of Oriental art sales, made spring a bumper crop in the specialist world of fans.

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”.

Advertising and souvenir fans from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries received a mixed reception at the April 10 Special Auction Services sale at Newbury devoted to works collected by the late Martin Willcocks.

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.