Intimate Letters and Fascinating First Editions

Ian Fleming
Series of letters to his wife Ann, c irca 100 letters, 1940s–1960s
Estimate: £200,000-300,000

A uniquely substantial and significant series of letters: Ian Fleming's correspondence with Ann, the great love of his life. This correspondence chronicles his relationship with his wife Ann, from the erotic intensity of their early clandestine love affair to the embittered complexity of their final years of marriage. The collection encompasses intimate love letters, lively descriptions of travels around the world, gossip of rich and famous friends, their shared passion for the natural world, the writing of the James Bond novels and their phenomenal success, which dominated his final year.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

William Shakespeare
Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, 1632, the Second Folio
Estimate: £70,000–100,000

The Second Folio edition of the most important work in English literature. The second folio also contains the first appearance in print of John Milton. The second folio edition of Shakespeare's plays, which in principle was a page-for-page reprint of the First Folio of 1623, was printed in 1632 by Thomas Cotes, who had taken over the Jaggard shop following Isaac’s death in 1627.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Enigma Machine
Operational Service Enigma, (Enigma 1), 1944
Estimate: £50,000–70,000

A very fine, fully operational 3-rotor enigma I cipher machine. The Enigma I, also called the "Heeres" Enigma, was used by the German Heer (Army), and the Luftwaffe (Air Force). The Enigma machine set a challenge that was answered by the remarkable team at Bletchley Park, whose achievements provide one of the most compelling stories of World War II. Breaking Enigma was the work of many, including Polish cryptographers who had already begun to decipher Enigma traffic before the war; naval forces who risked their lives capturing Enigma machines and code books.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

[The Saint Albans Chronicle.]
Here begynneth a shorte & a breue table on these cronycles, Westminster : Wynkyn de Worde, 1497
Estimate: £50,000–70,000

A very rare complete copy of one of the earliest English chronicles to appear in print. This is the second edition of the "Saint Albans Chronicle", so-called after the first edition "compiled in a booke and also enprynted by one somtyme scole mayster of Saynt Albons" (as stated by Wynkyn de Worde in the colophon here) in 1485.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations, First editions, 1776
Estimate: £50,000–70,000

“A near fine copy of the "first and greatest classic of modern economic thought". (Printing and the Mind of Man), which transformed the subject of political economy and introduced the key concepts which have dominated the field ever since, even up to and beyond the great financial crash of 2008.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

E.H. Shepherd
“A Very Grand Thing – The Trouble at Owl’s House”, Original ink and watercolour
Estimate: £40,000–60,000

This illustration has not been offered for sale for over five decades - an illustration for chapter 8 of The House at Pooh Corner. The preliminary pencil drawing for this finished drawing is in the collection of the V&A Museum and reproduced within Brian Sibley's The Pooh Sketchbook (London, 1982). Sibley notes "this drawing appears to have been made... for a later coloured picture (possibly for The World of Pooh) which was not used. The tree is based on that which Christopher Robin climbs during the search for Small..."

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Stanley Kubrick
2001: Space Odyssey, Archive relating to the production
Estimate: £30,000–50,000

Andrew Birkin (b.1945) was working as a runner on 2001 when he attracted Kubrick's attention in May 1966 by suggesting a location in England - Formby Sands - that could serve as a desert for filming "The Dawn of Man". Kubrick soon elevated him to First Assistant on Special Effects. The current lot provides a rich seam of unique and unpublished material providing insights into the creation of some of cinema's most unforgettable visual sequences.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species, First edition, 1859
Estimate: £15,000–20,000

Described by Freeman in his bibliographical handlist as "the most important biological book ever written" and within Grolier Club, Darwin (2004) as "one of the most influential books ever written".

View Lot

View Auction

Share

William Blake
Illustrations of the Book of Job , 1825 [but 1826]
Estimate: £10,000–15,000

Blake's renowned engravings for the Book of Job. Blake had completed the designs for what would become his Illustrations for the Book of Job around 1805-1806 for Thomas Butts, a clerk to the commissary general of musters who had by then become Blake's major patron. The publication was not conceived of until ten years later, when Linnell, hoping to provide his ageing friend with a much needed income, offered to finance the engraving and printing.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

British Prime Ministers Despatch Box
Probably 1840s-50s
Estimate: £10,000–15,000

An exceptionally rare Victorian Prime Minister's despatch box. Despatch boxes, in their traditional red, are used for the secure transport of confidential government information (today's "Secret" or higher classification). Victorian despatch boxes are rare and collectible, but this is an exceptional piece as it was commissioned for the use of the Prime Minister.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Embroidered whitework collar said to have belonged to Charlotte Brontë and have been embroidered for her by her sister Anne
Estimate £4,000-6,000

An evocative relic with compelling provenance. Martha Carr, née Hopkinson (1842-1905), was a student at Haworth National School when it was run by Charlotte Brontë's husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls. It is well documented that Charlotte helped her husband at the school during their brief marriage, during which time (1854-55) Martha will have been a favourite student. As the letters accompanying the collar attest, she continued at the school as a student teacher, and was presumably still there when Nicholls sold the contents of the parsonage and returned to Ireland, making her ideally placed to have been given a Brontë keepsake.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Italian walnut settee with provenance linking it back to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
Estimate £10,000-15,000

This sofa was almost certainly bought when the Shelleys took on their apartment on the top floor of the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa in October 1821. This was their final residence in Pisa, but the first that was rented unfurnished (see Shelley, Letters, vol.2, p.363). When they left Pisa in April 1822 they packed the furniture and shipped it by boat to their new (and Shelley's final) residence in San Terenzo on the Bay of Spezia (Holmes, Shelley, p.712). After Shelley's death later that same year the sofa passed through various hands, all connected with the poet, until it reached William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti the artist.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Lewis Carroll’s "second-best silver watch", engraved for his nephew, Bertram Collingwood
Estimate £8,000-10,000

Anton Bach, a German watchmaker, was located at 40 Great Russell Street, London. Collingwood family legend records that Carroll would occasionally visit ‘to get Greenwich time’. Carroll’s diary notes, on 1 May 1883, ‘To Bach, to leave my second-best silver watch to be put in order as a present for Bertram’. This is that watch. Given the introduction of the White Rabbit taking a watch out of his waistcoat-pocket in the third paragraph of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this is a wonderfully evocative item linking Lewis Carroll’s family and his work.

View Lot

View Auction

Share

Magnifying Glass, reputed within the Collingwood family to have been Lewis Carroll's
Estimate £1,500-2,000

In their introduction to Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators (Ithaca, 2003), Morton N. Cohen and Edward Wakeling provide a short description of Lewis Carroll and note ‘…he wore no spectacles, although he frequently used a magnifying glass’ (see p. xvii-xviii).

View Lot

View Auction

Share