A very modestly estimated job lot of 25 or so books offered in a recent West Country auction went on to sell for £6500 – but what got some bidders excited?
The catalogue for a January 25 sale held by Bristol Auction Rooms (20% buyer’s premium) noted only “Books leather bindings and others to include three vols of Le Cultivat America and three vols Histoire de Moroc, and Theory of Sound, Lord Rayleigh”.
The first named work, shown in the illustration right, is presumably a French edition, perhaps a 1784 copy of Crèvecoeur’s Lettres d’un Cultivateur Americain, or ‘Letters from an American Farmer’ as it was known when, two years earlier, it was published in England.