Part of a Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium) sale of March 14, it sold at £2900.
In the original portfolio, it contained just four pages of text, but the main attraction was a group of 10 signed and numbered etched or engraved plates.
One was the work of John Banting, who co-edited the work with Nancy Cunard, but the example illustrated above is an etching contributed by John Piper.
Auction appearances are few, but in 2015 Anthony Hobson’s copy of this work was sold at Christie’s South Kensington for £4500.
A signed, presentation copy of Winston Churchill’s 1899 account of the re-conquest of Sudan in The River War…, inscribed at Christmas 1919 for Sir James Stevenson, a personal adviser, sold for £4600 and a presentation set of Churchill’s The World Crisis of 1923-27 made £4800.
The first two volumes of the latter were inscribed by Churchill to Stevenson and accompanied by a letter, while the third volume, following Sir James’ death in 1926, was inscribed for Lady Stevenson. The fourth was unsigned.
Coleridge collection
Fifty or so lots of the Exeter sale comprised furnishings, family portraits, ceramics, fans, little boxes and much more besides from a Coleridge family collection formed by a descendant, Rosemary E Coleridge Middleton.
Manuscript and autograph material from that property included, at £4000, an 1825 letter from the poet to a niece, Fanny Patterson.
In a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of March 22, an 1837 first in original cloth of Phantasmion, a fairy tale in prose and verse by Coleridge’s daughter, Sara, sold for £1000.
