42 13th November 2010 antiquarian books Original boards lift greats
■ Market responds well to rarest of English literary texts
Ian McKay reports
A BELIEF that the really good things always sell is something that salerooms have long maintained. Where books are concerned, this conviction was successfully tested and proved last month. On October 27, Christie’s raised around £2m on just 65 rare books and manuscripts in various fields that made up Pt.II of the Arcana Collection. At Sotheby’s the following day the first portion of ‘The Library of an English Bibliophile’, an English literature collection running to 150 lots, raised close to £3m and, as at King Street, many auction records were broken in the process.
One of the 14 record breakers in
the Arcana sale, a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary that sold to an American collector for £130,000, was featured in last week’s ATG and I will be dipping into that special sale for many weeks to come. This week’s report, however focuses
mainly on the 19th century literature in Sotheby’s inaugural sale of a library
Right: rebacked at an early date in red paper- covered linen, an 1818 first of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus sold for £95,000 at Sotheby’s on October 28. A copy of the 1823 second edition of Frankenstein..., again in original boards, also set a record at £11,000.
Centre right: though plain in looks, these two unprepossessing sets were record-breaking rarities at Sotheby’s. In simple drab boards, the three volumes of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as first issued in 1813 by Thomas
Egerton, set a record for the book (although not the writer) at £115,000.
Far right: the 1847 first of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights, issued with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey as the third volume, sold for £135,000 at Sotheby’s.
of over 3000 books, built up over 45 years by an unnamed English collector and broadly valued at £8-10m, that is scheduled to be dispersed in a series of London and New York sales over the next few years. Here, too, records tumbled for writers and for individual titles, and as at King Street, just over 80 per cent of lots sold. Twentieth century highlights, plus a
few items that do not quite fit here – Darwin, Galileo, etc – will be covered in a future issue. It is not a beautiful thing to look at,
but a copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the drab boards in which it was first issued by Egerton in 1813 is something beyond the reach and ambition of all but a handful of devoted and Austen collectors, even assuming
they have necessary funds. Since 1975 just two copies in original
boards have come to auction and the one seen at Sotheby’s last month is by far the most desirable. This was the copy which Dr Rosenbach bought for $800 as part of a 1945 Parke-Bernet sale of the Frank J.Hogan library, and which in 1988 came back to auction in the Countess Doheny library at Christie’s New York. On that occasion it sold at $45,000
(then £25,640) and since that time copies in period, if not publisher’s bindings, have made as much as £48,000. Copies of Sense and Sensibility and Emma have both sold for more in that same period, but here was this special, uncut as issued copy back again and this time bidding reached a record £115,000. This copy lacks the original spine
labels and has seen some repairs to the spines and inner margins of the first few leaves of Vol. I, but the only other copy in original boards to have come to auction in recent times was not as attractive. Sold for $37,500 (£26,140) at Sotheby’s New York in 2001, it was browned and shaken in stained boards and Vols. II-III had been rebacked and supplied with facsimile labels. Copies of Sense and Sensibility (1811),
Emma (1816) and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818) in this collection were also uncut in original boards. The copy of Sense and Sensibility was
that which in 1939 sold for $3600 as part of Jerome Kern’s library and, 62 years later, was sold by Sotheby’s New York at $70,000 (then £48,795). This time, however, it made only a low-estimate £40,000, while Emma managed a mid- estimate £24,000. Just last year, at Christie’s New York,
Left: pick of the Oscar Wilde books in the collection was one of 75 signed, limited edition copies of The Happy Prince... of 1888, the Walter Crane plates present in two states. This more than doubled its estimate to sell for a record £22,000. Until now the best results had been £8500 for a copy sold five years ago at Sotheby’s and the inscribed ex-Bradley Martin copy, which in a 2004 return visit to the salerooms, again at Sothebys, reached £12,000.
another uncut copy of Emma in original boards made $85,000 (then £51,205) as part of the William E. Self library, and this is the Jane Austen novel that, despite the record breaking return of that uncut Pride and Prejudice, remains at the top of the Jane Austen price lists. In 2008, Bonhams sold for £150,000 a
Right: inscribed by Dickens to his great friend William Macready, this 1843 first of A Christmas Carol sold for £150,000 at Sotheby’s.
copy in period half-calf that Jane had her publishers send to Anne Sharp, a close and lifelong friend and correspondent who was the model for Miss Taylor, the governess, in Jane’s novel. Another presentation first of Emma,
one that she had sent to the novelist Maria Edgworth, whom she greatly admired, will be seen at Sotheby’s on December 16. That Maria did not feel
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