Collectables

A highlight of Sworders’ Country House sale in Stansted Mountfitchet on June 27 was a rare tinplate London omnibus.

The “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today”, according to Printing and the Mind of man, is that written around 300BC by the Greek mathematician, Euclid of Alexandria.

One of the odder lots I have stumbled across in the many June book sales is a worn and soiled 12pp autograph catalogue, or calendar of “35 nude male races held on Kersal Moor [near Manchester] between 1777 and 1811”.

Art books in a Ketterer Kunst (20% buyer’s premium) sale of May 22 included one of 15 deluxe copies of a 1950 edition of Harry Roskolenko’s Paris Poems, containing an original watercolour by Zau Wou-Ki and an extra suite of his lithographed illustrations. It sold at €42,000 (£36,240).

Promoted in a catalogue issued by Fonsie Mealy (20/25% buyer’s premium) for its May 20 sale as something “for the collector who has (almost) everything”, an autograph section from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake was sold at €27,000 (£23,480).

Agatha Christie’s books were much in evidence at a Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of June 7-8, among them a 1921 first of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

For more than 10 years after its donation, this Suffragette banner sat stowed away in a cupboard at a little charity shop in Leeds. On June 20 it sold at local saleroom Gary Don for £13,600 (plus 21% buyer’ premium).

'Tres Thomae…', by Thomas Stapleton, a leading Catholic theologian, is a set of three biographies of saints who shared his own first name. An exile from England, Stapleton was Professor of Theology at Douai at the time and his book was published there.

Last offered at auction at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1945, as part of the famed Bronson Winthrop collection, a drawing made by John Tenniel for Alice through the Looking-Glass made $16,000 (£12,600) at Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on June 13 – though the saleroom had hoped it might make twice that sum.

Book dealers Marc and Marcia Harrison were originally based in the UK but now live and work in the Netherlands. Alongside their business, Harrison-Hiett Rare Books, they continue to manage the annual PBFA International Fair in London.

This rather unsettling woodcut illustration shown above, an almost surreal depiction of an amputation, is taken from from a 1515, Grüninger of Strasbourg edition of Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Das buch der wund Artzeny. Handwirkung der Cirurgia.

Like many who deal in antiques, the late dealer Andrew Cottrell zeroed in on his chosen niche with an all-consuming passion, accumulating vast knowledge (and stock) in the process.

Original D-Day invasion flags may be fragile and rare but a spate of them has appeared on the market recently in the US.

A well-provenanced collection of Beatles and other rock memorabilia will be a highlight in one of Butterscotch Auctioneers’ tri-annual estate auctions at its Bedford, New York, saleroom on July 16.