In a worn but period calf binding, a 1697 first of John Evelyn’s Numismata. A Discourse of Medals… made £350 in the book section of a recent Cornish auction.
Offered by David Lay (18% buyer’s premium) as part of its August 21 collectors’ sale, it made a sum only twice bettered at auction.
A copy sold at Bonhams a few years ago for £480, but it was 40 years ago, at Christie’s, that the prize copy of this Evelyn work came to auction. Sold for £1700 in the King Street salerooms was a copy that had a later Rivière binding but was inscribed by Evelyn to the Earl of Clarendon and had errata corrected in the author’s hand.