Thursday, December 18, 2014

Antiquarian Book News

Unpublished Austen letter to be sold

Torquay Museum is to sell a previously unseen letter penned by Jane Austen. The letter, from the author to her sister, makes a reference to her novel Pride and Prejudice – which at the time had not yet been published.

The letter is part of a collection that includes letters from Charlotte Bronte, John Keats and Abraham Lincoln given to the museum in the 1930s. Director Basil Greenwood said selling the letter could raise £200,000.

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Donated Map of London

A rare 1868 map of London has been donated to a charity book store in Hereford. James Wyld's Post Office Plan of London 1868 is a linen-backed map of postal areas across central London.

It stretches from Hyde Park to the East India Docks and appears to have been hand coloured.

Its author, James Wyld, was a noted cartographer and map seller to the Queen. Had it been in tip-top condition the item might have been worth £150-£200.
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The Quest of Winchester Cathedral

Winchester Cathedral wishes to find eight medieval illuminations which are missing from what is considered to be the greatest surviving 12th-century English Bible. It is suggested that these may have been stolen in the past 150 years and so it is hoped that they may still survive – perhaps in private collections.

The Winchester Bible was commissioned by the cathedral’s bishop in 1160. Christopher de Hamel, a specialist in medieval manuscripts, describes it as “the finest English illuminated manuscript outside the British Library”. It remained in Winchester and was never used as a working Bible, because not all of the illuminations had been completed.

In an essay on the Winchester Bible, published this month to coincide with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Roland Riem, the cathedral’s vice-dean, revealed details of one of the thefts. On 16 August 1927, a thief wrote a bizarre letter to Francis Madge, the cathedral’s librarian, admitting that while he was being shown the Bible, he had removed an illuminated letter “S” from one of the manuscript’s pages. “That initial ‘S’ now ranks as the cornerstone of my possessions,” the thief wrote. The “S”, from the prologue to the Book of Joel, is indeed missing.
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Comics!!

A 1939 drawing of Tintin created by Herge for the cover of the weekly magazine Le Petit Vingtième sold recently for $673,468 at an auction of French and Belgian comic art held simultaneously in Paris and Brussels. The auction featured 101 works, of which 86 were purchased for a total of $2.4 million.

The India ink and crayon sketch by Herge topped an initial estimate of $440,000-$500,000. It also secured a world record for a Herge cover published in the magazine.

A comic book ‘The Hulk’, issue 18, sold for more than $8,000 at Back to the Past comics in Redford, Michigan, USA a few days ago. 

The issue is not only extremely rare but is also historic as it is the first time Wolverine from the X-Men is introduced.  Apparently the comic was found by chance.

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