Bumper offerings for January 2021

With our January auction catalogues already available to view online, Dominic Winter Auctioneers are confident that the broad and varied range of rare antiquarian books and desirable first editions for sale will appeal to a broad international audience.

Day One includes a selection of plates from the rare antipodean survey South Australia Illustrated, by George Angas, of 1846-47 (lot 4) as well as the large 19th century folio The Sundhya or the Daily Prayers of the Brahmins (lot 5) containing fine hand-coloured lithographs of Hindu priests or ‘brahmins’, after drawings by Mrs Sophia Charlotte Belnos, the daughter of William Moore, an assistant surgeon in the Bengal army, published in 1851. Almost exactly contemporary is Sir Harry Darell’s Views in China, India and the Cape of Good Hope, containing thirteen tinted and coloured lithographs, which appeared in 1852 (lot 14). An additional 50-lot section of 19th and 20th century travel books from a single-owner collection completes this part of the sale. In superb condition throughout, the library presents a rare opportunity to acquire titles rarely seen in commerce, or seldom encountered in collectable condition.

Day two concentrates on 19th and 20th century children’s books and first editions, although there are also several rare sets of early playing cards, including a complete deck of transformation playing cards designed by Charlotta von Jennison-Walworth, and published by Johann Cotta in 1805. The first of Cotta’s celebrated transformation decks, the cards depict characters from Schiller’s play The Maid of Orleans. Each card corresponds to one of the 52 weeks of the year (lot 464).

Amongst the unusually strong selection of 19th century literature is a very good copy of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens in original cloth (lot 503), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the first Bentley edition of 1831, lot 546), and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the first edition of 1873, also in original cloth (lot 551).

A third of the whole sale is devoted to important 20th century authors in first editions, including all four of the earliest James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, and Diamonds are Forever, in their original dust wrappers (lots 805, 806, 808 and 810), the 1963 Bond title On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, here offered in the limited edition of only 250 copies signed by the author (lot 825), as well as the penultimate Bond story The Man With the Golden Gun in its extremely rare first issue, with the gun design to the front cover blocked in gold (lot 829). Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, an amusing depiction of high society in the 1920s comes complete with the similarly rare first issue dust jacket (lot 900). Rounding off this major sale is a copy of the classic science fiction title The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, a first edition in dust jacket of 1951, which is also signed by the author (lot 913).