Books and Works on Paper

It is the practice of one US saleroom to publish what are called ‘starting bids’ rather than an estimate range in its catalogues.

Bearing a modest estimate of £50-75 but sold instead at £800 by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (23% buyer’s premium) on September 4 was a copy of 'Women’s Suffrage: a Short History of a Great Movement' (1912) by that renowned campaigner for women’s political rights, Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Signed by its author to the title-page, a 1939 first of TS Eliot’s 'Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats' sold for £4300 in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) auction.

The biggest literary impression in a recent Shrewsbury sale that combined medals and militaria with well over 200 lots of books and ephemera was made by poets – famous and otherwise.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

From a 5000-year-old pictographic tablet to a 5th century bible leaf - a small but fascinating London auction.

The second published work of the ‘flower book lady’ has no other auction appearance

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from September 17-October 4, 2019.

A final selection of works from the London summer sale of books from the Fox Pointe Manor library* includes a gruesome account of London’s ‘Great Plague’.

How very different London’s Euston station looks in this coloured aquatint from a copy of Thomas Talbot Bury’s 'Six Coloured Views on the London and Birmingham Railway'.

One of the star turns in the summer sale in South Cerney of Martin Orsky’s wonderful library emerged towards the end of the day. This was a uniformly framed set of five stencil coloured woodcut broadsides, heightened with bodycolour and glitter and representing ‘The Five Senses’, sold at £30,000.

Very different works by Daniel Defoe featured in an online summer sale in London: one famous, the other far removed in its subject matter and probably little known.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from September 10-26, 2019.

Entry card for 1823 auction sells in Gloucestershire saleroom nearly 200 years later

Complete with 16 tissue-guarded photogravure plates in the original, stylish decorative cloth binding, one of 200 standard copies of Peter Henry Emerson’s famous Marsh Leaves of 1895 was the star turn in a recent Norfolk sale.

It was as recently as June 13 that a presentation copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made a record $400,000 (£316,353) at Bonhams New York – as reported in ATG No 2398. However, barely a month had passed before another 1859 first attracted a substantial six-figure bid in London.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Jane Austen’s House Museum in Hampshire has successfully raised the £35,000 required to buy a fragment of a letter written by the novelist in 1814. The rare manuscript was being sold on behalf of its private owner by London dealer Maggs.

Works by Russia’s most revered literary figure rack up auction records in London saleroom.