Book

Although Charles Dickens is often credited with creating the ‘modern’ Christmas, some of the recognition should go to John Leech.

Work featuring the boy wizard Harry Potter is a familiar sight at the PBFA’s annual Christmas event

Code locked in a briefcase for two decades, a finely preserved, 1997 first issue of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was finally released this summer after being delivered by its Lancashire owners into the hands of a Derbyshire saleroom.

The ABA Chelsea Rare Book Fair is one of two major London events held annually by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association.

Billed as a ‘luminescent’ copy of one of the finer of all published florilegia, a copy of Jakob Christoph Trew’s 'Hortus nitidissimus… floribus' is estimated at £70,000-90,000 at Sotheby’s on November 12.

From November 26-28 Christie’s Paris will disperse part of the family library of the Comtesse Martine de Béhague (1869-1939) and Hubert de Ganay (1888-1974).

Pictured below is one of the 26 views, after Coke Smyth, that form a first edition copy of John Frederick Lewis’ 'Illustrations of Constantinople, Made During a Residence in that City &c., in the Years 1835-6'.

Venerable London rare book dealership Bernard Quaritch, established in 1847, has recently moved from Mayfair to Holborn. Here ATG talks to two members of the firm, Andrea Mazzocchi and Donovan Rees, about its new location and some wider trends in the book trade

The second published work of the ‘flower book lady’ has no other auction appearance

A final selection of works from the London summer sale of books from the Fox Pointe Manor library* includes a gruesome account of London’s ‘Great Plague’.

How very different London’s Euston station looks in this coloured aquatint from a copy of Thomas Talbot Bury’s 'Six Coloured Views on the London and Birmingham Railway'.

Very different works by Daniel Defoe featured in an online summer sale in London: one famous, the other far removed in its subject matter and probably little known.

It was as recently as June 13 that a presentation copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made a record $400,000 (£316,353) at Bonhams New York – as reported in ATG No 2398. However, barely a month had passed before another 1859 first attracted a substantial six-figure bid in London.

A first edition of the most famous work in angling literature will be offered at auction in North Yorkshire.

Vivid and lifelike, the lithograph of an Ariel Toucan shown below first appeared in a monograph by British naturalist John Gould (1804-81), 'The Bird Man'. Despite being in the hand of his wife Elizabeth (1804-41), this, like most of the illustrations in John’s publications, was long considered to be essentially his work.

A rare copy of the earliest-known depiction of a book auction emerged for sale in Gloucestershire at the end of last month.

Two men will appear in court in connection with the 2017 theft of rare books from a west London warehouse.