Sotheby's (London)

(28 cm), 136 pp., text illustrations. 202 lots. List of prices realised loosely inserted. Publisher’s laminated pictorial boards. - The collection was formed from the 1850s onwards, largely by Mary Ford, née Molesworth (1816-1910), and included unpublished letters by Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Edward VII, George Eliot, and Lord Nelson, a group of manuscripts relating to America and the Civil War (among which was an unpublished proclamation about slavery by Abraham Lincoln), and (lot 189) a manuscript of a hitherto unknown string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven (Allegretto in B minor). The single bifolium had been given by Beethoven to the English travel writer Richard Ford (1796-1858), who visited him in Vienna in November 1817; it was bought for £166,500 on behalf of the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana (A Mirror of the World: Three Thousand Years of Books and Manuscripts: an Exhibition from the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny, Switzerland, in Cooperation with The Grolier Club of New York, Cologny & New York 2001, no. 169). ¶ Occasional annotation.