Christie, Manson & Woods Ltd (London)

(27 cm), 207 (1) pp., illustrations (most in colour). 112 lots. Publisher’s printed wrappers. - Sale of medieval manuscripts, together with rare incunabula and later printed books, including “the best set of the Canaletto’s Vedute seen since the Stirling-Maxwell set, nearly fifty years ago, which was bought by Felix de Marez Oyens [£195,650]”. The sale “had its ups and downs, as did the condition of the books… The manuscripts mainly did very well… The printed books did less well, condition counting for more (quotations from a saleroom report in The Book Collector, Summer 2003, pp.240-241; also Spring 2003, pp.83-84). An early twelfth-century Porphyry “Isagoge” with parts of Aristotle and Boethius sold for £62,140 (in 2016, with Les Enluminures via “private collection”); an early sixteenth-century vernacular text of the “Isola beata” by Henrico Boscano in an attractive Milanese binding made £175,490 to a private collector (cf. Jill Pederson, “Henrico Boscano’s ‘Isola beata’: new evidence for the Academia Leonardi Vinci in Renaissance Milan” in Renaissance Studies, volume 22, 2008, pp.450-475). The two “additions from the collection of the late Count Antoine Seilern”, benefactor of the Courtauld Gallery, were a Boethius illuminated by the Virgil Master (£350,000; now Los Angeles, Getty Museum, MS. 72), and a copy of Frederick de Wit’s composite world atlas, printed on silk (one of three known copies; now apparently Michael R. Stone, Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla). Other property of Count Antoine Seilern was sold by Christie’s in 1982: Printed books including fine English literature and a collection of English Recusant books; the properties of the 10th Duke of Devonshire’s Charitable Trust, the late Basil Jacobs, the estate of the late Count Antoine Seilern and various other owners (19 May 1982); Fine printed books and manuscripts; the properties of the estate of the late Count Antoine Seilern and various other owners (23 June 1982); and in 1998: Albrecht Dürer: Prints from the collection of the late Count Antoine Seilern (8 July 1998). ¶ Annotated copy, partly priced.