Part of a Keys (20% buyer’s premium) sale of April 11-12, it was bound in contemporary half calf with another Colburn & Bentley title issued that same year, a copy of the American writer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or the Sleepwalker, first published in 1799.
Sassoon memoirs
Sold at £1050 in the Aylsham sale was a copy of the 1931, first illustrated edition of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Complete with dust wrapper and pictorial slipcase, it is signed by the illustrator, Barnett Freedman.
Bid to £1400 was a first in soiled but contemporary calf of The New Experienced English-House Keeper…, a work published for the author in Doncaster in 1795.
That writer was Sarah Martin, someone who is probably much more familiar as the author of a well-known children’s book, The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog. First published in 1805-06, this latter work has made as much as $8000 at auction.
A somewhat speculative lot was one in worn and soiled vellum and described only as “a mid-18th century manuscript receipt book, circa 35… pages + a large quantity manuscript arithmetic pages circa 1747”. It sold at £800.
A two-volume, 1815 first of Sir John Malcolm’s History of Persia…, bound in blind stamped calf of the period, made £1500.
Works of particular local appeal included a rare copy of Fifteen Etchings by the Norwich School artist and engraver Henry Ninham. Published in Norwich in 1875, following his death in the previous year, it contains a biographical notice by J Reeve. It sold for £500.
The final session of the sale included all sorts of boxed lots of books and ephemera, but two 18th century manuscript volumes of Quaker interest, copy letter books of the correspondence of John and Philip Eliot, sold well at £2300.
