Antiquarian Book News

PBA Galleries – October 15 – 11am

Sale 571

Illustrated and Children's Books — Oz — Fine Books in All Fields

Among the highlights:

• First combined edition of L. Frank Baum's Little Wizard Stories with the very rare first state dust jacket. Estimate: $7,000-$10,000.

 * Elegant Extracts. Prose, Poetry, & Epistles. 18 volumes, each with a charming fore edge painting of the English countryside, housed in a custom locking bookcase. Estimate: $15,000-$20,000.

• First appearance of the final version of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, finely bound in full purple morocco. Estimate: $800-$1,200.

• Mrs. Loudon's Ornamental Greenhouse Plants with 42 hand-colored plates. A superb copy in the original cloth. Estimate: $1,500-$2,000.

• Trianon Press edition of William Blake's The Book of Thel. One of 20 copies with progressive proof plates. One of 12 lots of Trianon Press editions in this auction. Estimate: $1,500-$2,000.

• Aventuras de Juan Esparraguito. The story of a boy who dreams of someday becoming an asparagus. Wonderfully illustrated. Estimate $1,500-$2,500.

• One of only 10 copies of Elephant Folio by Wisconsin book artist JoAnna Poehlmann. Estimate $1,500-$2,500.

• All of the original art work for Peter Thornhill's children's book Wilfred Rabbit and Augustus Fox. Estimate: $4,000-$6,000.

• Original artwork by illustrator Jessie M. King for the Children's Hospital in Glasgow. Estimate: $6,000/$9,000.

Each lot illustrated in the online version of the catalogue.
Bid directly from the site. Now available in the Bid Live Now section

Nearly 650 lots of rare and important books including collections of early children's chap books, Kate Greenaway's Almanacks, Trianon Press editions of William Blake, graphic novels and comic art, original illustration art, Limited Editions Club, golden-age illustrated books and more. A large collection of works from the Oz series by L. Frank Baum and his successors is also featured. The Fine Books in All Fields section of the auction includes works on architecture, science and medicine, religion, finely printed books, a large selection of finely bound books, fore edge paintings, miniature books, color plate books, history, travel, literature and much more. Something for all tastes.

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Bad buy comes good

Daniel Crouch Rare Books has donated an embroidered map created by the Disabled Soldiers Embroidery Industry and dated 1926 to the Bodleian Library. The embroidery fragment is based on a section of the Sheldon Tapestry map of Oxfordshire, one of four maps completed around 1590, depicting Oxfordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, all of which are in the Bodleian Library, and Warwickshire, which resides in the Market Hall Museum, Warwick.

The fragment was bought blind at an auction, in the hope that it might be 16th or 17th century original, but it turned out to be a 20th century copy. Its historical significance therefore took another turn. The fragment will be restored and then exhibited in the Weston Library, alongside other Sheldon tapestries and fragments.

The piece is copied from the Oxfordshire map, which includes London. It extends west to east from Paddington to Hackney, and north to south from Finchley to Stoke Newington. The embroidery was commissioned by Lady Granet and shown at several Disabled Soldiers Embroidery exhibitions in the late 1920s.

The Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibition of the four Sheldon tapestry maps in 1914. It was the first time that all four maps could be viewed together and the impact the display had was immense. For Britain in the throes of a recovery from WW1, the Sheldon Tapestries with their depiction of England’s green and pleasant land proved immensely popular. Countrywide searches where mounted to discover more fragments from the ‘Sheldon’ workshop, as well as requests for artisans to create copies of sections of the maps.

For men severely injured on the battlefield, the needlework created a way of making money, but also a much- needed therapeutic artistic outlet. Very little is known about the Disabled Soldiers Embroidery Industry, but it is likely they created works on a commission basis, which were exhibited and sold to create revenue to continue the society’s work. 

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The Bard in Wool

The story of how William Shakespeare’s father slipped from wealth to bankruptcy, leaving his impoverished son to struggle to establish himself as a poet and actor before making his own wealth in the London theatre, has long been an established part of the mythology surrounding the playwright. But a new study of the family’s business in the wool trade suggests this is far from an accurate account.

David Fallow, a former financier, has spent years studying the Shakespeare family’s wealth, poring over documentary evidence from a time when “wool was to the English economy what oil is to Saudi Arabia today”.

Financial transactions and other surviving records have led him to conclude that the portrayal of John Shakespeare as a failed trader is a fable: John Shakespeare was a national-level wool dealer, and legal research, coupled to analysis of the wool market, proves this. The Shakespeare family apparently never fell into poverty.

Leading scholars Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the academic charity, are so interested in Fallow’s research that they commissioned him to write a chapter for a major publication marking next year’s 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Fallow is among twenty-five of the world’s foremost academics and writers, including Michael Wood, Germaine Greer and Margaret Drabble, who have contributed essays to The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.

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