Slug Headline

Rare’s annual round-up of the top-selling books at auction shows there’s nothing like a good drama to get prices rising.By Alastair Smart

‘Literature’s passé’, ‘Americana’s booming’, ‘Science isn’t quite as popular as it used to be’ – it’s conventional to descend into talk of fashions, trends and movements in the world of book auctions. But where’s the romance in that? When it comes to influencing which are the year’s top-priced lots, there’s nothing as important as the twists of fate that bring books to auction… A family feud and imminent eviction from his castle caused the Earl of Macclesfield to sell his library, whose books occupy 7th, 8th, 28th and 42nd places on our list. A chance discovery in a Scottish library of centuries-lost drawings, based on Raphael’s plans for reconstructing ancient Rome, earned 20th spot. And perhaps most fateful of all was the electrical fault in the attic which precipitated a raging fire at Wardington Manor in Oxfordshire – and though firefighters and local villagers rescued the Manor’s 700 atlases and geographical texts, the subsequent repair costs forced Lord Wardington to sell his spectacular collection, items of which occupy 14 places in our Top 50. The Wardington sale in October 2005 was the highlight of the book auction year (running June-May), and for fashionspotters it was proof (along with the June 2005 sale of the first printed map to fetch $1million, Waldeseemüller’s world map from 1507) that atlases, maps and travel books are the vogue items of the last year. They cite the March sale of the Davidson collection, with its works on the early voyages of exploration and discovery in Australia (9th, 17th, 34th), as further

evidence of this. But do two big sales necessarily make a trend? Isn’t there something to be said for enjoying the Wardington and Davidson sales purely for what they were, namely auctions of numerous spectacular books? These were very special items, regardless of their genre, and the prices they fetched reflected that. As Rupert Powell, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Auctions, points out, “Fondness for atlases and travel literature is nothing new. The payment of particularly high prices for the Wardington and Davidson items is because they were once-in-a-lifetime stuff, not because they were atlases or travel books. The top prices depend on the rarity and condition of a particular item that’s come up for auction.” At the very top end of the market, then, it appears a book’s genre is somewhat irrelevant. True quality and rarity – plus the twist of fate that brings a special book to auction – will always dictate what achieves the highest prices, regardless of the latest fashion. Cyclical trends may well exist in the bookauctioning world, and atlases may well be flavour of the last twelve months, but that’s only really noticeable outside the variegated atmosphere of the Top 50, in which a book’s uniqueness and condition are what matters. This is borne out by a cursory glance at the Top 10, which comprises: colour-plate books (1st, 5th), manuscripts (2nd, 4th, 6th), an atlas (3rd), a travel book (9th), a work of Surrealist art and poetry (10th), and early printed science books (7th, 8th). Such an eclectic Top 10 demonstrates that,

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