44 17th April 2010

antiquarian books

The winning old world charm of the county set

■ Yorkshire surveyed in 380 lots and Kent seen in just a handful

Ian McKay

reports

A COLLECTION of hundreds of Yorkshire books and maps, formed in that county and in large part made available for view there, but then sold in Gloucestershire by Dominic Winter on March 31, is the principal focus of this report. To this is added a much more modest group of Kent books sold, in the more usual fashion, on home ground.

Yorkshire collectors and dealers had a chance to view over half of the 380 lots at a Harrogate valuation day. Sales by lot of 86 per cent doubtless reflect that local promotion, but buyers were selective and there was little demand or competition for low- to middle-range material. The rare or curious, however, did well.

Among the maps was a 1772 first of

Thomas Jefferys’ The County of York

Survey’d..., on a scale of one inch to the mile, which sold at £2400.

The map has been sectionalised and laid on linen on four sheets, each measuring 18in x 3ft 101

/2 in (46cm x

1.18m). It incorporates inset town plans of York, Scarborough, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull and Ripon and two large vignettes of Fountains Abbey and Middleham Castle containing the title cartouche and the dedication to Charles, Wentworth. This coloured copy was in a modern but antique-style gilt calf book box. A reduced version of the Jeffery map, revised and corrected in 1816 and drawn at two miles to the inch, took £1350 and an 1829

Upper right: ‘The Fool Plough’, showing the celebrations on the public holiday known as Plough Monday, a plate from the copy of Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire sold at £2000 at Dominic Winter’s sale on March 31. The plough driver has a bladder on a stick as a whip, the fiddler is a clown in female dress, and the figure of Captain Cauf Tail wears a cockade and a real calf’s tail crossed with coloured ribbons.As one would expect, the auctioneers also chose to illustrate the famous plate ‘The Collier’, in which the truck- hauling locomotive, built by Murray & Blenkinsop in Leeds in 1812, is the earliest available printed image of a steam-engine on rails.

Right: a mapsheet from the 1772 first edition of Jefferys County of York Surveyed, showing the Humber estuary and inset views of York and Scarborough, as well as a large engraved vignette of Fountains Abbey containing the title cartouche. Sold at the same South Cerney sale at £2400.

copy of Bryant’s Map of the East Riding of

Yorkshire..., a sectionalised map on four 2ft 1in x 2ft 6in (65 x 75cm) sheets and held in a period morocco gilt solander box, sold at £500. A Map of the Country

extending Ten Miles around Leeds..., re-

surveyed and corrected to January 1, 1849, by Martin & Fox, Surveyors, was a coloured copy of this sectionalised and linen-mounted map. Measuring 3ft 8in x 4ft (1.13 x 1.23m), it reached £760. The last two went to the private buyer of the 1772 Jefferys map. The more successful collections of views included various publications issued by Rock Brothers of London. One lot, offering oblong octavo Views of Whitbyand ...Scarborough, each in gilt decorated cloth and containing 24 and 30 engraved vignette views respectively, reached £440. (On March 10 at Tennants of Leyburn, a coloured litho Bird’s Eye

View of the City of York by Nathaniel

Whittock, dated to 1858, sold for £650). An album of 74 ink drawings of mostly

Yorkshire buildings, views, etc., produced c.1887-89 by a W.G. Fox and bound up as ‘Rambling Sketches’, sold at £920. A collection of printed York views dating to

1836 features among the accompanying caption stories, but an even more localised subject was Thomas Lister

Parker’s Description of Browsholme Hall in

the West Riding...,which sold at £640. Containing 20 etched plates and in an elaborately gilt-decorated calf binding, this guide is one of 100 copies printed in 1815 for private distribution. No other guide appeared until 1957, when the house was first opened to the public. Directories were, in large part, offered in multiples and some made substantial sums. A lot offering Jones’s Mercantile

Directory of Leedsof 1863, White’s New Directory of the Borough of Leeds, 1853,

and ten other Leeds directories from the years 1851-1932 was valued at £150-250 but sold at £2900 to a determined telephone bidder.

James Bolton of Halifax, a self-taught naturalist and illustrator, is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on British song birds, Harmonia Ruralis of 1794-96. While neither that work, nor his famous

study of ...Fungesses growing about

Halifaxof 1788-90, were present in the collection, a copy of an earlier work, the first part of his Filices Britannicae; an

History of the British Proper Ferns...,

printed in Leeds in 1785, did sell at £900. It was in modern boards but complete with all 31 etched and coloured plates. A second part was issued in 1790. Published in Doncaster in 1808 was local writer Richard Boothby’s Treatise on

the Diseases of Cattle..., in which he

revealed cures that he had, for 20 years, “adopted with so much success”. Untrimmed in the soiled and dusty but original boards, it made £740 (Burmester). Bid to £480 was Francis Kendall’s

Descriptive Catalogue of the Minerals and Fossil Organic Remains of Scarborough

and the Vicinity..., published in that town in 1816 with coloured title vignette and six engraved plates, five of them coloured. Showing some light offsetting and a few holes to the text, it was in later boards. Sold at £820 to a specialist dealer was a 1767, Leeds first (in contemporary sheep) of Ann Peckham’s The Complete

English Cook, or Prudent Housewife...

No Yorkshire sale, of course, would be complete without a copy of George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire of 1814

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