(29 cm), 105 (3) pp., black & white portrait-frontispiece, [5] colour plates, 48 plates (pls.1-48). Lots numbered 1-37. List of prices realised and buyers’ names loosely inserted. Publisher’s printed green boards. - The 37 Western illuminated manuscripts offered in the first sale realised £363,450, then a world record at auction for any sale of Western manuscripts. The highest price, £88,000, was paid by an anonymous bidder using the pseudonym “de Gourlay” for the “Speculum historiale” of Vincent de Beauvais (now Bibliothèque nationale de France, MSS NAF 15939). ¶ Fine, unmarked copy.

(29 cm), 109 (3) pp., colour frontispiece, 6 colour plates (pls.A-F), 47 black & white plates (pls.1-47). Lots numbered 38-75. Publisher’s printed green boards. - The first four manuscripts in the second sale, all written before 900, sold above estimate: the Nonantola St Augustine, to Olschki (now Rome, Biblioteca nazionale centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, cod. 1357), £48,000; the canons of the Council of Aix-la Chapelle, to Breslauer, £19,000 (now Fondation Martin Bodmer, cod. 1348); the capitularies of the Caroline dynasty, in the recension of Ansegisus of Luxeuil Abbey, to Kraus, £24,000 (now Yale, Beinecke Library, Ms. 413); and Collectio Dionysio-Hadriana from Mainz, to Rosenthal, £12,000 (now Princeton, Scheide Library, M139). H.P. Kraus paid £85,000 for a Bible illuminated for Niccolo Albergati (H.P. Kraus, In Retrospect: 100 outstanding manuscripts sold in the last four decades, New York 1978, item 54; now Yale University, MS 407). The decorative Book of Hours of Charlotte of Savoy (1425) was sold for £40,000 to the Texas lawyer Arthur Haddaway (now Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.1004). The sale total was £391,750. “It is unlikely, barring accidents, that material of this quality, and in this condition, will appear in the sale room again” (from a saleroom report, in The Book Collector, Autumn 1969, p.378). ¶ Fine, unmarked copy.