Auction Report: May Sales

- At Bloomsbury's 3 May sale of the Angling Collection of George Miskin, the top lot was a Henry Maurice Page oil painting, at £8,000. The top-selling book was a large-paper copy of Frederic M. Halford's Floating Flies and How to Dress Them, which sold for £6,000. Full results here.

- The 9 May Travel, Atlases, Maps, & Natural History at Sotheby's brought a total of £2,417,875. The top price, as expected, went to Linnaeus Tripe's Views of Burma, 120 albumen prints, at £277,250.  A collection of 250 maps of Southeast Asia fetched £223,250. Full results here.

- On 10 May, PBA Galleries sold the Library of Michael Killigrew desTombe, in 233 lots. The top-estimated lot, John Dee's Monas hieroglyphica (1564), did fetch the highest price at $38,400 (well under the $50,000-80,000 estimate). Full results here.

- Just 177 of the 227 lots in the Christie's Paris Importants Livres Anciens, Livres d'artiste et Manuscrits sale on 11 May sold, for a total of 3,644,787 EUR. The ~1490 Tuscan Mahzor did even better than expected, selling for 1,857,000 EUR.

- Bloomsbury sold Important Books and Manuscripts on 15 May, in 372 lots. Two lots shared the top price of £25,000: a Kelmscott Chaucer and a single leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. Full results here.

- Swann's 15 May Early Printed, Scientific, Medical, and Travel Books, in 400 lots. An illuminated liturgical manuscript sold for $36,000. The Hebrew Bible signed by Increase Mather sold for $7,800.

- Also on 15 May, Livres et Manuscrits at Sotheby's Paris, the total was 2,309,050 EUR. The Guillaume Apollinaire letters sold for 276,750 EUR.

- At Christie's 18 May Important Printed Books and Americana from the Albert H. Small Collection, 111 of 151 lots sold. The Third Folio (the only one of the Shakepeare Folios to sell) was the top lot, at $374,500. Audubon's Quadrupeds fetched $362,500, and the Humphry Repton lots did quite well. I'll have a more complete rundown of this sale in the summer FB&C.

- Bonhams sold the Angling Library of Alan Jarvis on 22 May: the top lot was William Blacker's Catechism of Fly Making, Angling and Dyeing (1843), which sold for £187,250.

- At Bonhams 23 May sale of the Stuart B. Schimmel Forgery Collection, the top lot was an album of Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, which sold for £13,750. I was fairly surprised at some of the prices here, which seemed pretty low for the most part. A copy of Wise's forgery of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets fetched £7,750.

- The top lot at PBA Galleries 24 May Fine Literature & Books in All Fields was a first edition of Ulysses, which sold for $8,400.

- Sotheby's sold Music and Continental Books & Manuscripts on 29 May, for a total of £1,873,750. The top lot was a Mozart letter at £241,250.