Book

Anyone familiar with HG Wells’ 'War of the Worlds' knows that the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one – but the things that do make it come with some serious firepower.

The sale at Minster Auctions (20% buyer’s premium) in Leominster on November 24 included a copy of an important work on neoclassical interiors.

First part of a collection which covered the walls and cellar of two whole flats is offered at auction

The Glaisdale Library was the collection of Martin Henry Burtt, a well-known figure in the Yorkshire and indeed national agricultural worlds.

Anglophile American lawyer’s excellent and extensive collection is sold in New York.

Cambridge auction attracts high bids to secure several delights discovered in job lots

Modern, limited edition issues of well known books figured prominently among the best-selling lots in an October 4 sale held by Lacy Scott & Knight (22.5% buyer’s premium) of Bury St Edmunds.

A copy of the 1543, first German language edition of a work that centuries later, in 'Printing and the Mind of Man', was declared to be “perhaps the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published” was offered by Gloucestershire saleroom Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) on October 12.

A Dutch travelogue from the early years of Arctic exploration sold for £44,000 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) at Chiswick Auctions on October 26.

Translation was first time a major poem of antiquity appeared in an English language form.

An edition of Queen Victoria’s Leaves from the Journal of our Life on the Highlands… took £550 at a Mallams (25% buyer’s premium) sale of September 23.

Bid to £3400, a 1703 first edition of Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland in a later full calf binding proved the most expensive item in the 250-lot book and ephemera section that opened an October 5-7 auction at Stride & Son (18% buyer’s premium).

Vienna antiquarian bookseller Michael Steinbach is celebrating 50 years in the business and has produced a catalogue to mark the milestone.

Two leading book dealers have come together to jointly buy the eponymous William Reese Company and its 40,000 stock of books.

Major sales marked the opening days of two London fairs, Firsts: London’s Rare Book Fair and Tribal Art London.

In 1902 the author Booker T Washington sent a typed and handwritten letter to the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie regarding his recently published work.

Though around 30% of the 150 lots remained unsold, no fewer than eight of those offered in a held by Christie’s (15/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) in London brought six-figure bids.

On offer at the Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs sale held by Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh on September 28 is an anti-slavery broadside: 'The Sorrows of Yamba, or, the Negro Woman’s Lamentation. To the Tune of Hosier’s Ghost'.

Sold online for a record $20,000 (£16,340) at the former Butterfields, now Bonhams Los Angeles (27.5/26/20/14.5% buyer’s premium) salerooms as part of the David Lloyd collection of modern literature was a 1909 first edition of Frank L Baum’s 'The Road to Oz'.