A busy month for Dreweatts & Bloomsbury with 6 relevant sales

- by Thomas C. McKinney

Bloomsbury has six sales in March that will be archived into the Rare Book Transaction History

As winter gives way to spring, and the pace picks up for things in the northern hemisphere, so too does the auction game for works on paper. For Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, no less than eighteen auctions are scheduled for the month of March. Of these, six are potentially relevant to you, readers of the Rare Book Monthly, and they include over 1800 lots all told.

For collectors of photography, March 5^th and 6^th see two separate sales on the docket. 19^th and 20^th Century Photographs from a Private Collection is the first auction and contains 213 lots. Photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ansel Adams are only a small sample of the names available. The following day, March 6^th, Photo Opportunities takes place with 245 lots for sale, 207 of which are contemporary photographs, and the other thirty-eight being books. This sale is focused on the 20^th century and has modest estimates.

On March 12^th, The Bibliophile Sale takes place and is the first of two book sales. Featuring 483 lots with estimates topping out at £3,000-4,000, the auction contains a wide variety of price-accessible material for collectors such as an illustrated copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells signed by the artist Edmund Dulac. (lot 190, est. £3,000-4,000) or Arts et Métiers Graphiques, a graphic design book on book design and production (lot 115, est. £1,500-2,000). One week later on March 19^th, Continental, English & Middle Eastern Books and Manuscripts brings 169 lots to market featuring high profile items like lot 115, a first edition in English of the first complete translation of Euclid’s The Elements of Geometrie (est. £20,000-30,000), or lot 80, a large illuminated Ottaman Qur’ran from 1776 (est. £12,000-18,000).

Immediately following Continental, English & Middle Estern Books and Manuscripts, a sale of Autographs, Memorabilia and Vintage Posters is scheduled for March 20^th. With 292 lots, the autographed material shines with examples from Charles Dickens (lot 35, est. £3,000-5,000), Paul McCartney and George Harrison of the Beatles (lot 47, est. £2,000-3,000), and Houdini (lot 227, est. £2,000-4,000) among the highlights.

Wrapping up the month for Dreweatts & Bloomsbury is their 445-lot sale Modern & Contemporary Prints on March 26^th. A significant amount of famous and significant artists have their works included in the auction, including Lill Tschudi, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Marcel Dunchamps, David Hockney, and Banksy. This is a can’t miss sale for collectors of modern prints.

Details for all six sales are as follows:

19^th and 20^th Century Photographs from a Private Collection

2 p.m. GMT Thursday March 5, 2015

Link to Dreweatts & Bloomsbury catalog

Link to online bidding on Invaluable.com

Bloomsbury London

Bloomsbury House

24 Maddox Street

London

W1S 1PP

Photo Opportunities

2 p.m. GMT Friday March 6, 2015