Antiquarian Book News

Illuminated Manuscript over Six Centuries old sells for £186,000 in
Dr Timothy Bolton's Inaugural Western Manuscripts & Miniatures Sale at Bloomsbury Auctions

Sale Total £706,837
77 Lots sold
100 Lots offered
77% Sold by lot

Dr Timothy Bolton commented after the sale: "We're delighted with today's result and our growing department is eager to build on these foundations. Bidding from both the room and the internet was notably energetic, and proved the market in fragments and leaves to be as strong as that for illuminated and decorated books."

Auction Highlights

The cover lot, an opulent and glittering prayerbook from fourteenth-century Metz, sold for £186,000 to a European private collector [pre-sale estimate £40,000-60,000 Lot 95]

A pocket gradual of the thirteenth-century, still in its original binding after seven centuries, sold for £32,240 [pre-sale estimate £12,000-18,000 Lot 85]

A sermon collection made in northern France c. 1400, and illuminated by artists who also worked for the grand bibliophiles King Charles V, the Duc de Berry and other members of the French royal family, and still in a late medieval binding, exceeded its high estimate and sold for £26,040 [pre-sale estimate £15,000-20,000 Lot 88]

A bifolium from a fifteenth-century manuscript in the breathtakingly rare Glagolitic Croatian script, reused on the binding of a seventeenth-century printed book, was bought by a private collector for £28,520 [pre-sale estimate £8,000-12,000 Lot 35]

Other notable fragments and leaves included a first century BC. or AD. papyrus diploma in Latin, the rarest language of the papyri, which sold for £9,920 [pre-sale estimate £8,000-12,000 Lot 7], a small scrap of a sixth-century Italian codex, which was the earliest witness to Augustine's commentaries on the Gospel of John, which made £19,840 [pre-sale estimate £20,000-30,000 Lot 8], a leaf from an early ninth-century copy of parts of the Old Testament which made £18,600 [pre-sale estimate £15,000-20,000 Lot 10], and an exceptionally rare eleventh-century relic list from Merseburg, which made £9,920 [pre-sale estimate £8,000-12,000 Lot 14].

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Heavy-handed editing

Twenty issues of a weekly magazine, ‘All the Year Round’, edited by Charles Dickens have been discovered to be Dickens’ own set. Leading academics have confirmed that the notes are annotations in his own handwriting.

For years thousands of articles, short stories and poems which appeared anonymously in the magazine or without attribution as Charles Dickens ’name appeared at the top of each page.  The discovery solves the mystery of which Victorian writers were commissioned by Dickens and identifies new works by many leading authors of the time; including Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll and Wilkie Collins. Dickens’ notes mean that between 300 and 400 authors have been identified as responsible for some 2,500 contributions.

Dickens’ notes mean that between 300 and 400 authors have been identified as responsible for some 2,500 contributions as well as three of dubious quality by his sons, Frank and Sydney. The annotated volumes are thought to have been Dickens’ way of keeping a personal record of who wrote which items. Leading academics believe that the discovery rewrites, effectively, many authors’ bibliographies throughout the 19th century.

The bound collection had been owned by the Duttons, a wealthy family from North Wales, since the 1920s before being bought by a Wrexham book seller last year. It is assumed the Duttons obtained it after 1895 when the periodical went bust. It is believed that it was sold around this time because Charles Jnr., who took over editing the journal after his father’s death, had very little money. He died a year later, leaving just £15 to his widow and eight children.

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Doyle Turned Sleuth

A series of letters to a police captain outlining why convict George Edalji should be cleared of mutilating horses has gone on display in Portsmouth Central Library as part of a large Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, had it would seem, turned sleuth himself. For years the Doyle and Captain George Anson exchanged a bitter war of words in hand-written and typed correspondence, showing how there was no love lost in their bizarre relationship.

The vitriolic exchanges began in 1906 when Conan Doyle first investigated the case against Edalji, 27, who served seven years’ hard labour following a conviction for mutilating horses. Conan Doyle did not believe Edalji could have carried out the crimes at night because of his poor eye-sight.  The senior archivist for the library and archive service at Portsmouth City Council, said: ‘I think the Edalji case appealed to his natural inquisitiveness in crime.

Edalji was acquitted in May 1907 after more than 10,000 people protested against his conviction. But the correspondence continued until 1920.

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Two Return

Two manuscripts, stolen from the Yusuf Ağa Manuscript Library in the central Anatolian province of Konya, Turkey, were found in a private collection of a university in America. Utrecht University PhD student Hüseyin Şen realized two manuscripts from the Seljuk era were in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg collection at the University of Pennsylvania Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, after researching birdhouses for his wife. An examination revealed that the artefacts in the United States were two of 103 manuscripts and seven books printed in Arabic that had been stolen from Konya in 2000. 

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