Results: Books, Maps & Manuscripts Sale 27th November

Books, Maps and Manuscripts were in high demand in the specialist sale at Tennants Auctioneers on 28^th November, which saw strong prices throughout and a strong selling rate of 95%. Amongst the many lots achieving hammer prices well above estimate was a small collection of religious manuscripts predominantly dating from the 17^th and 18th centuries, which sold in six lots for a combined hammer price of £9,630 (all figures exclude buyer’s premium). The top lots in the collection were a Spiritual Instruction Manual, written in 1648 for ‘My Only Friend Mrs I.G.’ by the unknown ‘S.G. alias E.C.’, which sold for £3,200. A 1949 handwritten note at the rear of the manuscript suggests a possible candidate for the author is a Dr Stephen Goffe. Also selling well was a Religious Commonplace Book of Alethea Langdale, dating from the early 18^th century and sold together with two further manuscripts for £650. A note at the beginning of the manuscript suggests that Alethea Langdale was likely a student at St Monica’s, Louvain, which later moved to Newton Abbot in Devon.

Elsewhere in the sale, a first edition of Richard Blome’s important work on the English colonies in America and the West Indies, The Present State of His Majesties Isles and Territories of America (1687), sold for £3,000 and included engraved folding maps after Robert Morden. From the Victorian era were a group of Rome Photographs, which included twenty-six albumen print photographs of Roman landmarks such as the Forum, the Colosseum and the Temple of Vesta (sold for £1,000), and a Victorian Autograph Album belonging to Charles Wilkinson of Kendal, which included the signatures of Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Cardinal Newman and William E. Gladstone (sold for £2,800). Selling well, too, was a copy of Eugene Grasset’s Plants and the Application to Ornament, published in 1897, which sold for £2,200.

Finally, demonstrating keen interest and demand for ephemera, was a single-sheet public notice Lifting of Dead Bodies, which was sold for £600. The notice outlined the arrest of two men – James Smith and John Rogers - accused of removing bodies from graves. The pair were discovered removing the bodies of a woman and child from the churchyard in Castle Douglas, Galloway, by a young man passing by in the dead of night. After alerting the neighbours, the pair were pursued and caught. Rogers later ‘turn’d King’s evidence’ and recounted how Smith had been employed for some time lifting bodies and taking them to Edinburgh, and had even sold his dead sister having filled her coffin with rubbish.

The sale achieved a total hammer price of £50,260 with a 95% sold rate for the 112 lots.