Valuable printed books and manuscripts, sold on behalf of the British Rail Pension Fund : Including the Doria atlas; a complete collection of John Gould’s ornithological works; Lubieniecki, Theatrum cometicum, Amsterdam, 1668, fine presentation copy; Shakespeare’s Second and fourth folios; Tyndale’s New Testament, 1534; Balbus, Catholicon, first edition, third issue; Aesop, Vitae et fabulae, Naples, 1485; an outstanding autograph letter signed by René Descartes; substantial autograph manuscripts of Jane Austen’s The Watsons and of Volume the third; the autograph manuscript of Charles Lamb’s celebrated essay; The praise of chimney-sweepers: a May Day effusion; the autograph manuscript of the first part of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English opium eater, 1821; Humphrey Gilbert, grant of land assigning 1,500,000 acres of land in America, 1582; the autograph manuscript of Napoleon I’s early autobiographical love-story Clisson et Eugénie; Richard Dadd’s autograph manuscript of his poem, Elimination of a picture & its subject–called the [fairy] feller’s master stroke; a fine series of forty-two drawings by “Phiz” to illustrate Dicken’s Little Dorrit; the autograph account of Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery and development of penicillin (catalogue of an auction sale conducted by Sotheby's, London, 27 September 1988)