Books and Works on Paper

A single-page letter sent on the day before Steve Jobs’ 19th birthday to a close school friend, Tim Brown, sold for $400,000 (£292,825) in New York.

Modestly estimated at $3000-5000, a richly illustrated manuscript that presents in two finely bound folio volumes a pictorial record of the ‘Costumes et Plantes de L’Hindoustan’ made $80,000 (£58,395) in a New York auction.

A Christie’s New York (25/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) online timed sale achieved six-figure bids for no fewer than eight lots and very high prices for a great many others while running up an impressive and premium-inclusive total of close on $4.75m (£3.45m).

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

A live online October 28 sale held by Forum (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) attracted a much higher than expected bid for this small and rather browned poster promising that, for one day only, visitors to The ‘Stockton House’ could view not only the preserved head of the renowned bandit Joaquin, but ‘the hand of Three Fingered Jack!’

Edition of Shakespeare’s works from 1663 heads varied selection in Cambridge.

A single-lot sale on October 19 offered an illuminated Ashkenazic prayer book that realised a premium-inclusive $8,307,000 (£6,019,565).

A third selection of 16th and 17th century English books from Fox Pointe Manor was offered by Forum (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on October 21.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Gary Munson collection delivers a string of rarities sold for record-breaking sums

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Painted with an image of an urn to the front cover of its vellucent binding and with a view of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire to the rear, the Book of Common Prayer & Book of Psalmes shown below was printed in 1774 by T Wright & W Gill for the University of Oxford.

An exceptional, expanded and specially cased example of Ippolito Rosellini’s 'I Monumenti dell Egitto e della Nubia' of 1832-34 topped the bidding in a Fonsie Mealy (20% buyer’s premium) sale of the library from Howth Castle.

Among the book lots offered as part of an October 7-8 sale at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) the earliest was a Burgundian ‘Hours of the Virgin’ manuscript.

Two very different lots shared the highest bid honours in a September 30 sale held in Norfolk. A manuscript recipe book dating from the late 17th/early 18th century onwards was, as such, accomplished in several different hands.

Library on offer at Forum auction in London was based on works collected by a man whose roles ranged from alchemist to diplomat

Running to just 20 or so words, a tiny signed card in which Abraham Lincoln instructs Edwin Stanton to meet with the African-American abolitionist and officer Martin Delany in Washington led the bidding at Doyle (26/21/15% buyer’s premium) on September 23.

Now handsomely bound in full red morocco and contained in slipcases, a set of first-edition copies of what are collectively known as ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ of CS Lewis led a Thomson Roddick (18% buyer’s premium) sale of October 7 with a bid of £3400 from a buyer on thesaleroom.com.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Sold for £16,000 in a September 23 sale was an album of 41 watercolour studies of birds produced by William Weston Young (1776-1847).