A hundred and eighty lots in a recent West Sussex sale that offered great variety and some real rarities came from the library at West Horsley Place in Surrey.
The core of Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium) May 15 auction, they were books from a collection formed by Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809-85), and continued by his son, the liberal politician Robert Milnes-Crewe, 1st Marquess of Crewe, who died in 1945.
Lord Houghton was both politician and poet, a distinguished man of letters and the author of the first biography of Keats, as well as a friend of Tennyson.