Thursday, April 23, 2015

Antiquarian Book News

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

A letter written by Charles Rennie Mackintosh to a young person is among a new collection of books donated to the Glasgow School of Art. The book is signed: “Your Friend, Uncle Tosh”. The letter written in 1898 has been donated to GSA and a further collection of some thirty books has also been donated from a school in Birmingham. Mackintosh was the architect of the world famous Mackintosh Building at the GSA which was ravaged by a disastrous fire last May.
———————————
Military History Auction

Military History Auction
Photographs, letters, ephemera and books

An online auction commencing at 19:00 ACST
Thursday 30 April 2015

Bidding Now Open | Click Here to View the Catalogue

A fine selection of rare and important photographs, letters, ephemera and books relating predominantly to the First World War, but including sections on 19th-century military history, the Boer War and the Second World War.

Highlights include a superb group of fifteen unrecorded panoramic photographs of Gallipoli, a collection of unique half-plate glass negatives featuring First World War Australian servicemen, a suite of graphic (and very candid) letters from an Australian soldier on the Western Front, and the identity tag of a prisoner of war of the Japanese in the Second World War.
———————————
QC donates books

The State Library of Victoria has been donated a collection of books and pamphlets: amongst which are some first-hand accounts of the execution of King Charles. These are valued at a little under $8 million. The collection also contains early editions of noted writers including Chaucer, Milton, Defoe, and Swift.

The library's head of rare books, Des Cowley, said that the collection's centrepiece was the huge array of extremely rare tracts and pamphlets printed during the English Civil War in the mid 17th century.

The collection was donated to the library by Melbourne barrister John Emmerson, QC, after his death in August last year. Dr Emmerson began collecting books in the 1960s when he was studying nuclear physics at Oxford University. He continued buying books after he returned home to Melbourne in the 1970s as he started a new career as a barrister specialising in intellectual property.
———————————
A Pope disobeyed

In 1679 Pope Innocent XI ordered a book written by a Spanish Jesuit to be destroyed, but his orders were disobeyed as the  336-year-old work has turned up in a British store.

The dilapidated copy of Varia Opuscula Theologica  by Doctoris Francisco Suarez, written in Latin, contains a stamp which suggests that it was once held in a Rome library. Experts believe that it is possible that the book may have come from one of the famous Catholic colleges in Rome.


Rothschild Prayer Book


One of the world's most expensive illuminated manuscripts is now on display in Canberra. The $15.5 million Rothschild prayer book, owned by media mogul Kerry Stokes, has been unveiled at the National Library. The 150-page book, commissioned about 1505 by a member of the imperial court of the Netherlands, has hardly been seen by the public in 500 years.

The manuscript features full-page colour miniature drawings by masters of illumination, and was part of a collection of Nazi-confiscated treasures that was returned to the Rothschild banking dynasty by the Austrian government in 1999. 

To Contact Ibookcollector
Ibookcollector © is published by Rivendale Press

No comments: