Sotheby & Co. (London)
Munby (Alan Noel Latimer), 1913-1974

(26 cm), 140 (4) pp., folding frontispiece (lot 85), [34] leaves of plates. 640 lots. Bound in publisher’s printed wrappers. - “After some initial fumbling, [Hely-Hutchinson] rapidly developed into an energetic, and for a newcomer a most adventurous, participant in the revival of interest in the collecting of fine bindings which has been perhaps the most notable movement of taste in English bibliophily of the past two decades… He cast his net wide as well as deep; and there were not a few who wondered whether the market might not wilt under such a concentrated load. In the event, it proved solidly, and for a number of star lots, spectacularly buoyant” (from a saleroom report in The Book Collector, Summer 1956, pp.169-170). The fine Fugger binding on a copy of Euripides had been in the Wilmerding sale in New York, in 1951, for $3500; it was bought here by the Parisian bookseller, Pierre Berès, for £2500. A copy of Münster’s Rudimenta mathematica (1551), bound for Henry, Prince of Wales, in about 1610, had been in the London salerooms in 1950 (£155); it sold now to the Royal Library at Windsor, for £280. A Magnus binding acquired in the Landau sale in 1948 (£280) was sold to the bookseller Arthur Rau for £340. In 1954 the collector had made a spectacular gift to Eton College (in memory of his son, Patrick) of 50 precious books and manuscripts, including the five volume Cicero bound in green morocco for Grolier (ex-Powis Castle Library) and an Erasmus in ten volumes bound for Thomas Wotton; some of these are described by Howard Nixon in a monograph which the collector presented to his fellow members of the Roxburghe Club in 1953. Also in 1954, Hely-Hutchinson presented to Birmingham University (in memory of his brother Victor) his almost complete collection of Baskerville imprints. Books and manuscripts also were given to the British Museum and to King’s College, Cambridge. Catalogue introduction by A.N.L. Munby. ¶ Annotated copy, partly priced. List of prices realised and buyers’ names loosely inserted.