Lyon & Turnbull, based in Edinburgh, with offices in Glasgow and London, has been in the auction business since 1826. Although their name may not be the most familiar to North American buyers and sellers, they are a long established house hosting events in many fields. Their book and manuscript sales are consistently interesting and profitable.
In a detailed April email Dominic Somerville-Brown, Rare Book Specialist for the firm, answered a variety of questions posed by Rare Book Hub concerning the ins and outs of doing business with their company.
“In the United Kingdom books are exempt from any kind of import duty or sales tax, regardless of age, value or number, which,” he pointed out, “is to the great advantage of any overseas collectors wishing to sell their books through Lyon & Turnbull. This is because books were exempted from VAT (Value-Added Tax) when the tax was introduced in 1973, and have remained so ever since. It is one of the few lasting achievements of the government of Edward Heath, a name which our American customers might recognise if at all from the lyrics of ‘Taxman’ by The Beatles. The exemption also applies to other items including unframed maps and bound manuscripts.
“For other items, such as prints, paintings, and autograph letters, VAT does apply, but in practice, any items which fall under the category of ‘artwork, collectables and antiques’ and are more than 100 years old benefit from a generous regime of reductions. Import VAT, for instance, is reduced to 5%, and in some cases does not apply at all. Anyone interested in buying or selling with Lyon & Turnbull is welcome to contact us to discuss the process in more detail.”
L&T has an upcoming early Summer book auction in June. “Our next sale of Books and Manuscripts on June 16 (sale #905) is set to be strongly antiquarian, with highlights including a first edition of Paradise Lost, in an unrestored contemporary binding, a 15th-century Netherlandish breviary on vellum, and the edition princeps of Seneca, printed in Naples in 1475, these all from a single Scottish collection.
“We are accepting new consignments for this sale until early May. We hold three Books & Manuscripts sales a year, usually in February, June and September, in addition to extra sales of single-owner collections.”
Asked about the company’s affiliation with Freeman's | Hindman he replied, “Our relationship with Freeman’s (formerly Freeman’s | Hindman) is a successful marketing partnership between the oldest auction houses in Scotland and the United States. Our day-to-day operations are distinct, but the finest hour in our shared story was doubtless a few years ago when my Lyon & Turnbull colleague Cathy Tait made the stupendous rediscovery of an original signer’s copy of the Declaration of Independence during a routine valuation appointment in the Scottish countryside. A few months later, it was back home in Philadelphia, on exhibition at Freeman’s headquarters in advance of its sale in a single-lot auction. The final price of $4.4 million was several multiples of the $500,000-$800,000 estimate and a magnificent vindication of the transatlantic alliance.”
As a recent highlight of their book auctions he pointed to the sale of the James Sterling collection, “The word ‘important’ is often used by auctioneers as a euphemism for ‘valuable’, but in 2025 Lyon & Turnbull were entrusted with a library which deserved the word in every sense.
“James Stirling was an 18th-century Scottish mathematician, miner and protégé of Sir Isaac Newton, who made valuable contributions to the development of calculus as the Newtonian revolution unfolded. His library contained his own notebooks, letters from fellow mathematicians including Leonhard Euler (the figure responsible for the ‘e’ function on your scientific calculator), first editions of major mathematical and scientific works, as well as imposing editions of the Greek and Latin classics and staples of 18th-century travel literature.
“For most of Stirling’s life the collection would have been housed in the singularly inhospitable environment of his offices in the hillside mining village of Leadhills in southern Scotland, where he turned a poorly run and dangerous mining operation into something resembling a model community. Miraculously, the collection survived intact, preserved exactly as it would have looked in Stirling’s study as he contemplated matters such as the shape of the Earth, then a subject of great debate. Visitors to our salesroom were for a week able to imagine themselves in the library and era of this fascinating man. The interest in the sale was global, and many of the highest-selling lots found new homes in the USA.”
Somerville-Brown noted international buyers and sellers doing business with L&T should be aware of two important points: “Regarding the transport of items to the UK, we can and do engage fine art shipping companies on behalf of sellers to transport their items in the safest and most efficient way possible to the United Kingdom. However, the costs involved, and who is responsible for them, will differ for each consignment and depend on what is agreed with the client, so it would be impossible to speak generally on that matter.
“For the shipping of purchased lots post-sale, the buyer needs to contact a third-party shipping company (such as, but not limited to, those listed on our website), provide details of the lot and the desired insurance cover, and the company will provide a quote to collect, pack and ship the item. However, I can’t comment on variations in services provided by these companies, such as expected delivery time or insurance coverage.”
According to the Lyon & Turnbull website Dominic Somerville-Brown joined the house in 2022. He has worked in Rare Books since 2014, first for a leading antiquarian bookseller in London and subsequently as a specialist at auction houses across the UK.
He has handled libraries in fields including travel and natural history. Somerville-Brown has a BA in Arabic from the University of Oxford.
View the L&T website and upcoming auctions at www.lyonandturnbull.com/auctions/auction-calendar
Reach Somerville-Brown at dsb@lyonandturnbull.com
