34 30th June 2012 antiquarian books
‘Pyramid selling’ that pays off
■ Carter archive and early photographic views stir bidding
Ian McKay reports
THE lure and mystery of ancient Egypt prompted some fierce bidding battles for documentary, pictorial and photographic lots in recent UK and US sales, and a very different, but equally specialised area of collecting – erotica and curiosa – has also raised the auction temperature.
Many years of fruitless searching had
brought little result but, in 1922, Howard Carter, having persuaded his backer, Lord Carnarvon, to support and finance one more season of digging, made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time in uncovering Tutankhamun’s tomb. For the first, and so far only time, he had revealed a completely undisturbed tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. Carter was an amateur with no formal
archaeological qualifications, a man who had at one time followed the traditional practice of selling antiquities to fund his digs, and received virtually no formal acknowledgment of his momentous find, but through the sensational nature of his discovery it may be argued that he remains to this day – with the fictional exception of Indiana Jones – the most famous archaeologist of all. Carter died in 1939, and six years later
the bulk of his archaeological papers were given to the Griffith Institute at Oxford University, which has now digitalised the archive at
www.griffith.ox.co.uk as ‘Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation’. The residue was were retained by
Phillis Walker, daughter of his sister Amy
and his favourite niece and principal heir, and remained with the family. The late John E. Carter gave T.G.H. James access to the papers when he was researching his 1992 book Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun, but on June 12 this important Carter archive was put up for sale at Bonhams. The substantial archive includes
autograph drafts of his own published account of the discovery, The Tomb of Tutankhamun – mostly relating to the third and final volume – lecture notes, incoming correspondence, including letters warning him of the danger involved in opening the coffins (Lord Carnarvon, it will be remembered, died within six weeks of the opening of the tomb) and copies of letters sent to fellow Egyptologists. It also includes photographs,
equipment used on his expeditions and even material relating to his own death and the funerary rites to be observed. There was quite naturally a great deal
of institutional interest and a desire on the part of many that the archive should find a suitable new home, but the winning bid of £90,000 was, I gather, made by an English dealer. Only 20 photographic views by Francis
Frith make up a large folio work of 1858, called simply Egypt, Sinai and Jerusalem, that proved the most expensive thing in the Bonhams sale, but each measures 2ft 6in x 21in (77 x 55cm), making it what the the photo-historian Helmut Gernsheim has described as “the largest book with the biggest, un-enlarged prints ever published”. These 20 albumen prints resulted from
Frith’s first trip to the Middle East in 1856, when he took with him huge cameras, a mountain of other equipment and even a mobile darkroom and large supplies of chemicals, as his chosen method – the wet collodion process – required that the plates be coated with light sensitive emulsions immediately before exposure took place. Descriptive text was provided by his
friends Mr & Mrs Reginald Stuart Poole, but of course it was Frith’s photographs, here in superb condition, that got everyone excited and produced a record bid of £280,000 against an estimate of
just £50,000-70,000. This star turn went to Folios of London
but it was a European dealer who picked up two other Frith collections on offer. These were Egypt and Palestine
Photographed and Described, an 1858-59 folio collection of 75 albumen prints plus a portrait of Frith in Turkish dress – each roughly 6 x 9½in (15 x 22cm) – which sold at £24,000, and a set of four folio volumes containing 144 albumen prints of Lower Egypt, Thebes and the Pyramids;
BUYER’S PREMIUMS
Bonhams, London: 25% to £25,000, then 20% to £500,000, 12% thereafter Christie’s, London: 25% to £25,000, 20% to £500,000, 12% thereafter Christie’s, Sotheby’s & Bonhams, New York: 25% to $50,000, 20% to $1m, 12% thereafter Zisska & Schauer, Munich: 19% 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.
Upper Egypt and Ethiopia; Sinai and Palestine; Egypt, Sinai and Palestine. The latter, regarded as the best and
largest issue of Frith’s Middle Eastern images and one that has the added benefit of gold toning, sold at £31,000. At a very different price level, Bonhams
also saw a bid of £1500 on a very rare copy in period red half morocco of Thomas Young’s Hieroglyphics... of 1823-28, which on almost 100 litho plates reproduces inscriptions collected by the Egyptian Society that he had founded in 1819. The introductory text states that 200
copies of the first fascicle were printed and the 53 named subscribers include some famous scholars and bibliophiles – among them William Gell, William Hamilton, Richard Heber and Richard Payne Knight. No other copy of the Young work
appears in auction records for the last 40 years and only half a dozen copies of Lorenzo Pignoria’s Vetustissimae tabulae Aeneae of 1605, one of the earliest books on Egyptology, are recorded at auction in that period. Seen at an earlier Bonhams sale, on
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