Rare Mathematical Book Sells for £16,000

A rare mathematic treatise published in 1801 by one of the greatest mathematicians in history is sold for £16,000 in Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps and Manuscripts Sale on 9^th April (all figures exclude buyer’s premium). Disquisitiones Arithmeticae was written by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), a German mathematician and astronomer who excelled across numerous fields of science, when he was just 21. The book, which is written in Latin, is focused on number theory; highly influential, it paved the way for great 19^th century mathematicians and indeed was still an important foundation text into the 20^th century. Copies of this first edition rarely appear at auction.

Also of interest was a set of three Egypt and Middle East Travel Journals written by George W. Mounsey in 1858 and 1859, which garnered much interest and finally sold for £4,000, ten times the lower estimate.  George Mounsey (later Mounsey-Heysham) was a lawyer from Cumbria, who later resided in London, and his journals chart a fascinating trip through Egypt and the Middle East with his travelling companions, one of whom was the well-regarded artist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. Comprising diary entries, prose accounts, sketches and watercolours of landscapes, people, flora and ruins, and descriptions of confrontations with Bedouin tribes, the journals provide a fascinating glimpse of an extraordinary journey. 

The sale also offered 43 lots that were the Property of Sir Brooke Boothby removed from Fonmon Castle, Glamorgan. The Fonmon Library comprised three family collections; firstly, that of the Seys family, primarily collected by Evan Seys (1604-1685), who studied at Christ Church Oxford, was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, served as Attorney General under Oliver Cromwell, and was a MP after the restoration, as well as being an antiquarian scholar. The library was subsequently added to by ten generations of the Jones and Boothby families, including the collection from the Boothby’s ancestral family home, Ashbourne Hall, which was sold in 1861. Highlights from the collection included a 1688 copy of Darius, King of Persia. A Tragedy by John Crowne bound with The Emperor of the Moon: a Farce by Aphra Behn, which sold for £1,000, and a collection of three circa 1730 works on Wine and Distillation, bound as one volume, which sold for £3,200. The volume included ‘The Art and Mystery of Vintners and Wine-Coopers…’ by ‘E.T’, a ‘Wine-Copper of long Experience’.

In an overall robust sale, further notable results were achieved for a 1934 first edition, second impression of To Catch a Thief by Miles Burton (a penname of  Cecil Street) and – a scarce early edition of a crime novel from the ‘Golden Age of Detective Fiction’ (sold for £800), and an album of 120 photographs of the construction of the Holland Tunnel (originally the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel), which runs between Manhattan and New Jersey (sold for £550). Taken circa 1919-1927 by ‘Denton Bastom Photographer’ of New Jersey, the photographs form an interesting archive showing the plans, the river shaft, the power house, the construction of concrete piles and much more.

The sale achieved a total hammer price of £79,920 for the 136 lots, and a sold rate of 97%.

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