Fine Books' own auction columnist Ian McKay broke the story of how a Church of England Diocese, looking for more space, sold off it's library of rare theological books for £36,000 (about $70,000). The buyer, a British bookseller named John Thornton, sold the best 50 books for £500,000 (about $1 million) and promptly retired to the country. Illustrated here is the first edition of the Bible in Greek, printed in 1518. Thornton consigned it to Sotheby's, where it sold for £60,000 ($110,000).
The Times of London just picked up the story. You can read Ian's in-depth report about the Bishop Phillpott's Library tragedy here. We should have an update in our November issue, now in the works.
The first thing Thornton sold was a massive extra-illustrated Bible that filled 63 volumes. (An extra-illustrated book is one that the owner fills with extra prints and drawings. In this case, adding thousands of illustrations, some quite valuable on their own.) What the Times doesn't mention is that the buyer, who paid £11,000 more for that Bible than Thornton paid for the entire collection, showed up with a razor blade, sliced out about 300 drawings and prints, and left the carcass for the auction house to deal with. The substantial remnant went to an American University (as yet unnamed). [Update: Sept. 25—the auction house said that's what happed to the books, but in fact a British bookseller bought the remnant and sold it on to a well-heeled collector who is having it rebound to account for the missing pages.]
The current issue (September/October 2007) of Fine Books & Collections has a story about the practice of book breaking - cutting up books to sell the best bits page by page. Get it on newsstands now.
[If you are arriving here via search engine, there's more to the story here.]
This case raises an ethical question for me: If a dealer is asked to make an offer on a collection and she realizes that the collection is worth considerably more than she can afford (cashflow-wise) to pay, is she ethically obligated to mention this when making the offer?
Posted by: Jill Hendrix | September 11, 2007 at 11:24 PM