Books and Works on Paper

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from July 3-12, 2018.

Dating from 1944, the ink, watercolour and gouache artwork shown belowwas made by Russell H Tandy to illustrate the cover of The Secret in the Old Attic, the 21st of Carolyn Keene’s ‘Nancy Drew’ mysteries.

From her Dorset cottage, artist and print-maker Rena Gardiner (1929-99) produced more than 40 guidebooks to historic places, buildings and the countryside, all of which she wrote, illustrated with drawings made directly onto litho plates and printed herself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

Bid to a record €18,000 (£15,660) in a May 15-17 series of sales held by Reiss & Sohn (18% buyer’s pemium) of Königstein, near Frankfurt, was a first edition of Immanuel Kant’s 'Critik der reinen Vernunft'.

A beautifully preserved 1937 first state copy of Tolkien’s 'The Hobbit' sold for £35,000 at Forum Auctions.

Shown below is one of 20 hand-coloured plates from 'Masken des Römischen Carnevals'. This was a rare and separate 1790 Weimar issue of the plates that illustrated a work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Roman carnivals published the previous year – an item that is itself a great rarity*.

The Wassenaar Zoo in Den Haag opened its doors in 1937 and closed in 1985, but its wonderful library, essentially untouched since the 1970s, has only now come to auction in London.