Comprising both a linen-mounted playing board and a 36pp instruction booklet, together with the original pictorial case, it far exceeded the expectations of Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium) when it sold at £880.
A Meggandorfer moveable toy-book, Princess Rose-Petal and her Adventures, c.1900, served as the catalogue cover illustration. However, with some defects, it sold short of expectations at £450.
Isaac Frost’s Two Systems of Astronomy, made £2000 rather than the suggested £120-200. The main attraction is the 11 plates printed in oil colours by George Baxter, the pioneer of that technique.
No other copy appears to have been recorded at auction since the mid-1980s, when Phillips sold copies for £35 and £80.
The sale’s most expensive lot was a 1583 Bible printed by Christopher Barker that, with many faults noted, reached £3200.
There was also a bid of £1950 on a copy of Lady Noel Byron and the Leighs: some authentic records of certain circumstances in the lives of Augusta Leigh and others of her family… that were of a ‘concern’ to a descendant, Anne Isabella, Lady Byron.
Edited and annotated by the Earl of Lovelace, it was printed in an edition of just 36 copies, designated “strictly private” and intended only for close family members. A number have nevertheless found their way to auction over the years.
Cycling soldiers
One of the more modestly estimated lots, illustrated only in the online catalogue, were two anonymous works focused on London’s cycling soldiers.
Published in 1932, The London Cyclist Battalion, a history of the 25th (County of London) battalion that had been disbanded some ten years earlier, was present in an undistinguished cloth binding, but an undated [1935] Story of the 60th (London) Divisional Cyclist Company boasted an amusing pictorial dust jacket. Together they sold at a treble-estimate £240 to a buyer on thesaleroom.com.
