Book

SOLD at £1650 in a July 6 sale held by Lawrences of Crewkerne was a group of ten volumes, mostly in contemporary full or half calf, that were grouped under the heading ‘Scandal’.

IN a 19th century binding of blue straight grained morocco, a 1548, first English language edition of Bishop Edward Fox’s The True Dyfferes between ye regall power and the Ecclesiastical power, translated from Fox’s 1534 Latin original by his friend and admirer, Henry, Lord Stafford, was sold at £1400 in a July 6 sale held by Lawrences of Crewkerne.

SOLD for £2200 (C.R. Johnson) at Bloomsbury Auctions on August 19 was a Batchelor’s Directory.., a work. of 1694, which goes on to describe itself as ...a treatise on the excellence of marriage; of its necessity, and the means to live happy in it: together with an apology for the women against the calumnies of the men. Bound in contemporary red morocco gilt, this first edition was catalogued as “a dedication copy from the author”, but to whom, we are not told.

AN escaped slave who became a prominent social reformer, journalist and public official, Frederick Douglass (1817-95) published a first account of his life in 1845, but revised and extended versions followed in 1855 and, finally in 1881 as The Life and Times...

BOUND in full calf, a 1579-80 edition of John Kitchin’s The Authoritie of al Justices of Peace... was sold for £700 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

IT was a third edition of 1799, slightly foxed and browned and lacking the half titles, but the copy of George Walker’s novel The Vagabond seen in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of August 19 was in a contemporary calf gilt binding and it sold at £400 (C.R. Johnson).

BOUND in contemporary panelled calf, a 1704 first of An Historical & Geographical Description of Formosa..., the two folding engraved plates (of 16 in all) torn but skilfully repaired, realised £600 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

INSCRIBED in both volumes “with the author’s love” to an Edith Barnes, presentation firsts of Lewis Carroll’s over-long children’s story Sylvie and Bruno of 1889 and its continuation or conclusion of 1893, the original red cloth bindings now uniformly faded to the spines, dampstained to the front of Vol. II and showing repairs to the spine ends of the first volume, was sold for £1400 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of July 15.

WITH the frontispiece and all but the last of the 34 double-page or folding engraved plates and plans in full contemporary colour, Isaac Commelin’s Histoire de la Vie & Actes memorables de Frederic Henry de Nassau, Prince d’Orange of 1656 sold for $32,000 (£17,580) in a Christie’s New York sale of June 9.

RIGHT: one of 23 coloured aquatints by George Hunt after M.E[gerton] that make up Airy Nothings; Or, Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-cum-Shorts; in a Circumbendipus Hop, Step and Jump, by Olio Rigmaroll, a slim quarto volume of 1825, this one shows ‘Quadrille Dancing at Mr Owen’s Institution, near Lanark’ – the model community established by social and education reformer Robert Owen at the New Lanark cotton mills.

RIGHT: translated by William Hamilton, the 1661 first English edition of Blaise François de Pagan, the Comte de Merveilles’ Historical & Geographical Description of the Great Country and River of the Amazones in America..., contains this important folding engraved map showing French ambitions in the area.

RIGHT: translated by William Hamilton, the 1661 first English edition of Blaise François de Pagan, the Comte de Merveilles’ Historical & Geographical Description of the Great Country and River of the Amazones in America..., contains this important folding engraved map showing French ambitions in the area.

JOHN Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness of 1810, the first book-length account of a single psychiatric case and a classic of the early literature in this field, was inspired by the case of James Tilly Matthews, a London tea merchant who undertook a self-styled peace mission between France and England in 1793.

THE early 20th century George Abraham of Keswick issued three titles that have become classics of rock climbing literature and two of them, offered by Dominic Winter on July 21, are seen right.

RIGHT: a folding plate from an 1847 first of James Clark Ross’ Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, the two vols. bound in later polished calf gilt by Henry Young of Liverpool, which made £1200 in a Dominic Winter sale of August 25.

THERE were two copies of Sailing and Fighting Instructions for His Majesties Fleet in a Sotheby’s New York sale of June 17.

ESTIMATED at £70-100 but bid way past that level by Taikoo Books of York was a copy of Captain R.L. Playfair’s History of Arabia Felix or Yemen…, a Bombay imprint of 1859 which also includes an account of the British settlement at Aden.

THE Rates of Merchandise, that is to say, Subsidy of Tonnage, ...Poundage and ...Woollen Clothes, or Old-Drapery, as they are Rated and Agreed on by the Commons House of Parliament..., a 1660 copy in rebacked contemporary calf of the book of rates required by the passing of that year’s Act of Tonnage and Poundage, was sold for £1000 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of June 17.

THERE are few things so distinctly American in the book auction world as the collections of ‘Oziana’ that arrive in the salerooms with remarkable regularity.

ISAAC ROSENBERG had produced just two small pamphlet collections of verse and a play before he was killed in action on April Fool’s Day, 1918, but his reputation is now established as one of the finer war poets.