£22,000 for John Gielgud’s Hamlet – the Olivier bequest

In a Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale reported earlier (Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1485, April 21, 2001) I mentioned a bid of £2800 on a 1930 (German text) Cranach Press edition of Hamlet, but at Sotheby’s on April 5, as part of the John Gielgud Collection, a copy of the English text version made very much more than that.

Sold at £22,000 to a private buyer, this was the copy that Laurence Olivier bequeathed to Gielgud, a…

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