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Antiques Trade Gazette 59


endangered species


Left: following on from works by Bedford and Lambert, The Pinetum Britannicum of Edward Ravenscroft was one of the three great coniferous iconographies of the 19th century. Publication was a lengthy process (1863-84) but the two folio volumes of the completed work offered 48 coloured litho. plates, four mounted albumen prints, a map and 643 wood-engraved illustrations to the text. In period half morocco gilt and with an earlier version of the Douglas Fir plate loosely inserted, a copy in the Lord Hesketh library showed some spotting, heavy in places, but sold for a record £11,000 at Sotheby’s. In that same sale a 1906-13, first edition of Elwes & Henry’s The Trees of Great Britain & Ireland took £7500 – again a record sum.


Below: one of 330 coloured engraved plates found in J.C. Schaeffer’s 1762-74 record of Fungorum... found in Bavaria and the countryside round Regensburg, each with Latin and German text printed to verso. The two volumes were ex-library with bookplates and labels but without disfiguring stamps and sold for £3600 at Dominic Winter on January 26-27. In 2002, the ex-Beriah Botfield/Longleat copy was sold for £8000 at Christie’s.


BUYER’S PREMIUMS


Bloomsbury Auctions, London: 22% to £250,000, 12% thereafter Bonhams, New York: 22% to $100,000, then 20% to $500,000, 12% thereafter Cheffins, Cambridge: 17.5% Chiswick Auctions, London: 20% Christie’s & Sotheby’s, London: 25% to £25,000, 20% to £500,000, 12% thereafter Christie’s, New York: 25% to $50,000, 20% to $1m, 12% thereafter Dominic Winter, Sth. Cerney: 17.5% Hartung & Hartung, Munich: 25% Hauff & Auvermann, Berlin: 24% Ketterer Kunst, Hamburg: 20% Reiss, Königstein-im-Taunus: 16% Stockholms Auktionswerk: 20% Thomson Roddick Laurie, Carlisle: 15%


NB: premiums may not apply or have been set at different levels where prices from sales of previous years are quoted. Exchange rates are those in effect on the day of sale.


Munich last November were supplied from another copy, but the woodcuts were in contemporary colour and it showed hardly any browning or staining in a 17th century vellum binding. The Berolzheimer copy, containing a 1940 sales invoice for £100 from Davis & Orioli of Wallingford, it sold this time at a record €52,000 (£44,860). Botanical books sold by Christie’s on


November 23 included a copy of Sweert’s Florilegium... of 1612-14, comprising a first


edition of Pt I and a second of Pt II, but with all 110 plates in contemporary colour. The work of a Dutch florist, this was essentially an unpriced sales catalogue (with text in Latin, Dutch, German and French) for the stock he had available at the Frankfurt Fair and over 560 varieties are featured on the plates. The Sweert sold below estimate at


£20,000 – although a low-estimate £25,000 would have been close to a record. Below-estimate prices were also registered for two other important lots in this King Street sale. A 1773-78, first of Jacquin’s Florae


Austriacae..., illustrated with 500 coloured engraved plates and bound by Mackenzie in green morocco gilt, was a British Museum duplicate that in 1831 sold for £11 and in 1994 made £18,000 as an ex-Beriah Botfield/Longleat lot at Christie’s. On this latest outing it stopped £6000 short of the low estimate figure at £24,000 to a European collector. Eight thousand pounds short of the low


end target, at £32,000 to Philobiblion UK, was a copy of Gallesio’s Pomona Italiana... of 1817-39, a work especially admired for the 160 colour-printed and hand-finished plates – described as “at once delicate and intense”. On December 12, Stockholms


Auktionswerk sold a 1775-98 first edition of Curtis’ Flora Londinensis for SKr270,000 (£25,345). In rebacked contemporary calf, this large folio collection contains a total of 433 coloured engraved plates after Sydenham Edwards. Perhaps best known for the Botanical


Magazine that he launched in 1787, and which still publishes today, William Curtis was the praefectus horti, or director of the Society of Apothecaries’ Chelsea Physic Garden, where for a guinea a year, subscriber members had access to both plants and the library. Begun as a rival to the Curtis journal in


1797, Henry C. Andrews’ The Botanist’s Repository was a larger format production which, it boasted, allowed for finer botanical accuracy without forsaking the beauty of composition. At Bloomsbury Auctions on February


24, a ten-vol., first edition set of 1797- 1814, bound in period half morocco and containing 664 printed and/or hand- coloured engraved plates, sold at £8000. This set bore the bookplate of John Bolton of Storrs Hall in Cumbria, a notorious figure who made his fortune as a Liverpool slave trader, was involved in the city’s local politics and in 1805 killed a Major Brooks in the last duel fought in Liverpool. Studies of Flowers from Nature..., a


collection of finely coloured botanical plates after Miss Smith of Adwick Hall, near Doncaster, was printed for its creator in 1818 and at the time had 77 subscribers – among them Mr Ackermann, who put his name down for ten copies. Bound in period half red morocco


and marbled boards, a copy offered by Chiswick Auctions on January 25 was a scarce complete copy, the ten plates present in fully coloured and uncoloured outline states. Athough it could not live up to the £7000-10,000 estimate – the title was detached and there was some slight


spotting, browning and offsetting – it was sold after the event at £5500 to Kew Gardens.


…and the rest Rarely seen complete firsts of the first


books devoted to Australian zoology and botany, examples of the first and only published volumes of James Smith’s A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland (1791) and George Shaw’s Zoology of New Holland (1794), were bound together in contemporary tree calf in a volume that sold for £35,000 as part of the Hesketh library at Sotheby’s. Works which began publication within five years of the first English settlement


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