Antiques Trade Gazette 43
to record heights
Poems. Lacking the paper lettering piece but uncut in original boards as issued in 1817, this sold at £22,000 – just short of the record £24,000 paid for another as- issued copy at Christie’s in 2004. The early decades of the 19th century
were a rich period in the annals of English literature, something certainly reflected in the success stories of this sale. A copy of Sir Walter Scott’s 1814,
first novel, Waverley..., that sold for £8000 in the original boards bore on the title pages of all three volumes, both the armorial stamps of Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, and the signature L.F. Baum, but the latter was not, it seems, the Wizard of Oz man. A pencil note records the fact that in 1906, Sotheby’s had sold this copy for £102. There were no spine labels on this set,
the same way about Jane’s work is well documented, but though the copy that she was sent now lacks the second volume, it does bear Maria’s signature and Sotheby’s hope that it may sell for £70,000-100,000. Austen’s celebrated send-up of the
Gothic romance, Northanger Abbey and the more gentle satire of manners that is Persuasion were posthumously first issued in tandem in an 1818 four-decker. A copy seen at Sotheby’s last
month improved on expectations to sell at £35,000 and only the “virtually unblemished” Capra copy has made more – $60,000 (then £41,825) at Sotheby’s New York in 2001. Uncut in original boards, though
later rebacked in red paper-covered linen, another publication that first saw
the light of day in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was – as the illustration above left shows – another of those works that were not much to look at from the outside but are of the utmost rarity in such condition and very costly. This was the copy once owned by
the lyricist and lifelong bibliophile, Paul Francis Webster. His first collection of English and American literature was sold at Parke-Bernet in 1947, but a second Webster sale took place at Sotheby’s New York in 1985, when this copy sold at $16,000 (then £13,115). This time it sold at a record £95,000. Almost exactly contemporary with
Mary Shelley’s ground-breaking novel and produced with the support of Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt (the dedicatee), was John Keats’ first published volume of
but it seems that it was issued both with and without labels. Scott may not be so popular now as he once was, either among readers or collectors, but the price paid last month finally beats the $11,000 (£6270) paid back in 1988 for the first issue Hogan-Doheny copy, which had been washed and recased, but preserved the original labels. Also in original boards, and indeed
unopened and unread, was an 1819 first issue of Scott’s medieval romance, Ivanhoe, which sold at a record £6000. Warmly inscribed on New Year’s Day
1844 for his great friend, the actor and stage manager William Macready, a copy of A Christmas Carol which sold for a record £150,000 was one of the most desirable presentation copies one could wish for. In 1839, Dickens had named his third daughter Kate Macready after his friend, and when Charles, along with his wife Catherine, embarked on his first tour of America in 1842, it was in the care of that same friend that they left their children. In the following year Macready made
Left: original bindings were very much a strong point of the October 28 Sotheby’s sale, but an 1859 first of Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam boasted a sumptuous red morocco gilt binding by the Doves Bindery. This sold at £17,000, which in sterling terms makes it a record-breaker, but in dollar terms it is pretty much on a par with the copy in Quaritch’s 1859 wrappers that sold for $27,000 (then only £14,060) as part of the Insley Blair library at Sotheby’s New York in 2004.
his first tour of America, so when Dickens had inscribed his copy he posted it off to New York. In a letter sent at the time, he wrote “I have sent you, to the charge of our trusted and well beloved friend Colden [the lawyer and philanthropist David Cadwallader Colden] a little book... which has been a prodigious success – the greatest I think I have ever achieved. It pleases me to think it will bring you Home for an hour or two”. The letter was not part of the lot,
but the book remains in almost pristine condition and has changed hands only a very few times since the American collector Ogden Goelet acquired it following Macready’s death in 1873. A year ago, the copy in the William E. Self library, inscribed to Eliza Touchet
continued on page 44
The library sold at Sotheby’s also included some literary gems from earlier authors:
Chaucer
Chaucer came in the form of a very fine copy of William Morris’s great Kelmscott edition of 1896. One of 48 copies of the paper issue bound at the Doves Bindery to Morris’s own 15th century-inspired design, it sold at £80,000.
Shakespeare
Shakespeare was however something of the 17th century – a copy of the 1640, first collected edition of his shorter, non-dramatic poetry in the volume of Poems assembled and, in the case of the sonnets, re-organised by John Benson. In a later, dark blue crushed morocco gilt binding by Bedford, it sold at £110,000. Copies in period bindings have made more. In 2007, at Christie’s, one copy in contemporary sheep sold at £170,000.
Milton
Thirty or so copies are thought to survive of Justa Edouardo King..., a finely printed Cambridge volume that commemorates the death by drowning of a young Fellow of Christ’s College. Among the poems contributed by friends and colleagues is the first appearance in print of Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas. In a purple morocco gilt binding, this was acquired in the 2004 Insley Blair sale for $100,000 (then £52,075). This time the price was a record £60,000.
Defoe
Acquired at auction in Germany in 2002, a 1719-20 first of ...Robinson Crusoe, the three volumes in later Bedford bindings of crushed red morocco gilt, sold at £35,000, but bid to a record £48,000 was an even scarcer Defoe item, a 1722 first of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders in 19th century panelled calf.
Burns
Once part of the celebrated Oak Knoll library of A.Edward Newton (dispersed in the 1940s), an exceptional copy in contemporary blue paper boards of the original 1786 Kilmarnock edition of Burns’ Poems. Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was another of the record breakers – and at £60,000, by a considerable margin.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80