Very different from those lots in the Tennants sale noted in the accompanying report was the watercolour used as the catalogue cover illustration. The work of Harry Rountree, presumably for an edition of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, it sold at £850.
Aldine press books of the early 16th century, mostly it seems in a good but much later full morocco or calf bindings, produced a number of the higher bids in a recent Yorkshire sale.
At £2700 in a Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) sale of March 7, the most expensive of them, bound in full morocco by Simier, was a work by Quintus Smyrnaeus, or Quintus Calaber as he was called in the first Aldine edition of his epic continuation of Homer’s account of the Trojan wars, the ‘Posthomerica’.