From Tudor Treasures to Sorcery School

2024 at Dominic Winter Auctioneers

As the year draws to a close, Nathan Winter looks back on some of the highlights of an auction year characterised by exceptional consignments and landmark sales. Whether you joined us online or in person, we thank our customers for another year of support and look forward to an equally exciting 2025.

A Magical Year for Literary Firsts

2024 continued the market trend for high prices in this field of collecting, with extraordinary rarities casting their charm. Chief among them was a remarkable complete set of the Harry Potter books gifted by J.K. Rowling to a young fan undergoing treatment for a serious illness. This collection included 9 signed titles each with personal inscriptions together with several notecards of moving correspondence from Rowling herself, transforming a modest group of reprints into a deeply touching literary treasure.

The crowning moment for Potter collectors came in December with the sale of a first edition, first impression of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. One of just 200 non-library copies from the initial print run of 500, this holy grail of Potteriana achieved an outstanding hammer price of £40,000.

Among other literary highlights was an unrestored first edition of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, rare with its dust wrapper, a first edition of Tolkien’s the Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy,  which realized a staggering £10,500, and a rare author’s presentation copy of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), inscribed to the famous bookseller William Foyle, which drew huge interest and achieved £11,500. Foyle’s friendship with Wells dates from around 1930 when he was invited as a guest of honour to the very first Foyle Literary Luncheon in 1930. Wells declined in characteristically amusing fashion ‘The letters I receive from my readers leave me no desire to meet any of them in the flesh!’.

Rare Early Manuscripts and Printed Books

A royal treasure made headlines in September when a 1555 edition of Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia bound for Queen Mary I of England came under the hammer. Before this sale, no books from Mary’s small, dispersed library had ever appeared at auction and the books and manuscripts extant are only be found in major British libraries and collections. This volume, with Mary’s cypher in gilt to each cover and containing additional hand-drawn contemporary maps, achieved our highest hammer price of the year at £140,000. The identity of the skilled cartographer and their sources remains a mystery yet to be solved by scholarship.  

In November, an exceedingly scarce 1473 edition of Duranti’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, published by Ulrich Hahn came up for sale. Hahn, a pioneering printer, was the first in Rome to print a book with movable type in 1467 and the first to print music with movable type anywhere in 1476. Despite some condition issues, this early printed marvel achieved a hammer price of £5,300.

Extraordinary Old Masters and Iconic Moderns

Our dedicated fine art sales take place three times a year. Old Master prints and drawings are a notable feature of these sales and this year included a rare complete set of the ‘large-scale’ two-section 1633 woodcut by Christoffel Jegher after Rubens famous painting The Garden of Love which happily surpassed its pre-sale estimate of £2,000-3,000, achieving £6,500. Rubens, who had a keen interest in the dissemination of his art through prints, began a close collaboration with Jegher. The original design is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sale also featured a Rembrandt etching of The Raising of Lazarus (1632), one of the largest and finest of Rembrandt's etchings in its 8th state, reaching a hammer price of £6,500

A beautiful pencil sketch portrait of Martyn Thomas by David Hockney was offered in March,  inscribed ‘For Freddie + Martyn with love David’ and achieved a hammer price of £20,000. Martyn Thomas, partner of the renowned ballet dancer and choreographer Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), met Hockney through his many professional collaborations with Ashton.

Fine Cartographic Rarities

Those more cartographically inclined found plenty to bid on this year, including the sale of John Melish’s seminal map of North America. Published in 1816, this was the first large-scale map to show the whole of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Drawing on military and state data, it marked a watershed moment in American cartography.

Closer to home was Greenwood’s Map of London (1827), the largest and finest map of the city produced in the early 19th century. No map provided greater detail or more accurate topography of the metropolis until the advent of the Ordnance Survey. A fine example, this copy rose to an impressive hammer price of £12,000.

Autographs and Photographs from Literary and Political Giants

A world record auction price of £25,000 was achieved in May for a signed Winston Churchill photograph. The iconic image, known as 'The Roaring Lion', was taken on 30 December 1941 during Churchill's visit to Ottawa. The double-signed photograph of Churchill by Yousuf Karsh is possibly the finest signed photograph of Churchill ever offered for sale. Churchill later said to Karsh, 'You can even make a roaring lion stand to be photographed'. The picture became one of the most widely reproduced images in the history of photography.

A previously unseen photograph taken in 1863 by Lewis Carroll, showing the 10-year-old Harry Wetherell Rowden with two of his younger sisters, Clara and Jessie Theresa, came up for sale in November. Their father was Dr Edward Wetherell Rowden DCL (1814-1870), a Fellow of New College, Oxford from 1833 to 1851, and a sub-Warden of the College in 1849. The photograph made an impressive £4,200

Textile Treasures

One of the many highlights from our increasingly successful textiles department was the remarkable Spriggs Collection which we offered in July.  This was an extraordinary time capsule of rare textiles in fine condition and with unbroken provenance from the early 19^th century which included a miniature walnut sewing etui making a record price of £1,700, and an extremely rare 18th-century girdle pin cushion ball which made an astonishing £18,000.

Perhaps the highlight of the October textiles sale was the rare blue sprang sash, circa 1620 which belonged to the Enys Family of Penryn, Cornwall. Such sashes, worn by senior military officers, had a practical as well as a decorative purpose; such is their tensile strength and ability to stretch laterally (due to the sprang technique), that - astonishingly - they were used as stretchers to carry wounded men off the battlefield. The owner was more than surprised when the lot made £6,000.

Relics of Military Heroes

Our Aviation & Military History, Medals & Militaria department headed by Henry Meadows, produced some outstanding successes in 2024 and featured several sensational single-owner collections, including The Bill Townsend Dambusters Collection, sold on behalf of the Townsend family. Flight Lieutenant William “Bill” Townsend, C.G.M. was the last pilot home from the famous ‘Dambusters Raid’ which took place on the night of 16/17 May 1943. The daring mission involved attacking German dams using specially designed ‘bouncing bombs’ and became one of the greatest military triumphs of the Second World War.

The collection included Townsend’s WWII RAF logbooks which recorded the raid and were signed twice by Guy Gibson. Estimated at £10,000-15,000, the fierce bidding eventually came down to two British collectors on the telephones with the final bid winning these historic logbooks for £29,000.

We look forward to welcoming our customers back to our auctions in 2025 to offer you more unusual and unexpected treasures.

For upcoming sales, take a look at our auction calendar and preview pages at dominicwinter.co.uk.